Blueberry
by ChakiChakiGirl
Summary: A new Powerpuff Z Girl makes the scene and boy, is she full of surprises!
1. Chapter 1

**Blueberry**

by Dee Eon

Foreword:

Blueberry origins: I fell in love with the two cute artist renderings of "Bunny" by Kjbionicle on the "To The Z!" web page and on Yuji Battakun's PPGZ site, and so I imagined a blended alternate character for it that'd uniquely bring the PPGZ into a racy pop aspect of amine it oddly hasn't touched. My anime fanzine addict brother turned my fancy into a piece of collaborative fiction. I welcome critiques and for someone to put this to a comic, but foremost, enjoy.

Dee Eon dot mac

--

"Where did you say, professor??" Akatsutsumi Momoko asked in the lab when she and Miyako and Kaoru arrived.

"Just wanted to know whether any of you have been doing any unauthorized travel around South America," asked Professor Utonium.

"South America??" Momoko said, puzzled. "But we've never even flown near there!"

"Nevertheless, it's come to my attention almost by accident reports that at least one of you have been sighted around Rio DeJaneiro and Buenos Aires and points south. In fact for quite a while."

"That's crazy!" Kaoru said with a snicker. "We don't even speak Spanish!"

"Actually, it's mostly Portuguese with heavy Italian influence in this province, mixed in with German and Dutch," Ken informed.

Momoko asked, "So what do you know professor?"

"The reports are very sketchy because this being doesn't tend hang around after good deeds and take autographs like some do. In fact these sightings are always so sudden and brief no one's even a close description much less a photograph, but what identification there is almost fits you girls to a 'T', that being a girl wearing a violet Powerpuff uniform, though the more keen eyed male witnesses tend to describe her as being a little more - er, developed."

"It's gotta be a joke!" Kaoru scoffed. "There's no one else but us!"

"At least in this era," Momoko added.

"Yes! I would know!!" Peach squeaked.

"Not necessarily," the professor continued. "After all, it just might simply be too far for you to detect more white energy! There's a whole planet between these two points."

"And Buenos Aires is about as from Tokyo City as you can get!" added Ken.

"But all the white lights have been accounted for since you found out about the fifth!" Momoko said.

"I know, that's the puzzle." Utonium said, pacing, "Also, there're no reports of monsters or super villains in South America like Mojo or Fuzzy to blame any black light activity on which usually results in the city wrecking battles and widespread havoc and devastation you three engage in while taking a monster down."

Momoko smirked. "Thanks Professor."

"Nothing personal. Instead, these sightings seem to occur at small minor incidents."

Miyako asked. "What kind of 'small incidents,' professor?"

"Small things like car accidents, zoo breakouts, bank robberies, kids who've fallen down wells, things like that."

"How long's this been going on, professor?" asked Kaoru.

"From what I could discern, almost a year."

Momoko was astonished. "Why haven't we heard this long ago??"

"Because these sightings are so brief and caught by so few, the police just log the sightings in an "X" file. It was just by chance our trouble scan computer's Google search found them in the new South American index."

Miyako wondered aloud, "Bank robberies. Animals escaping from zoos. Kids who fall in wells. It doesn't sound like stuff monsters are into to start with."

"Yea," Kaoru said. "Sounds like this violet UFO's just doing Girl Scout duty, not monster control."

"True, still, we've long suspected that though Kare's made Japan his home, he's definitely been around more places around the world, so there is a chance of spores being active in places we can't detect."

"And without Kare around to rule them maybe they're just lying low," Ken suggested. "We know they're lots of quiet monsters out there with regular jobs like Sakurako-san."

"Yea, wimps in hiding, not standouts like Mojo!" Kaoru put in. "Gotta give the monkey some credit for taking his lumps and bouncing back or it'd get real boring 'round here!"

Momoko nodded. "So you want us to investigate it, professor?"

"Yes. This sighting might well be a ploy by a new type of monster or even Kare's quietly returned from space somehow to cause mischief with your reputations to turn people against you. Odd thing is, there's no reports of anything bad about you all there at all."

"Doesn't seem to make sense," Momoko said.

"Right, that's when I worry when I don't know what villains are up to! Since you'll be away for a day or two get your standard permissions from your parents first."

Kaoru chuckled. "Gee, you'd think our folks would've wondered by now why we spend so much time being here – even at nights."

Miyako said, "Silly! Because they think the Professor's tutoring us for school."

"I know that, ditz! I meant sometimes we don't come home over for whole days and nights – and they don't even call here to check how we're doing."

Momoko shrugged. "I guess they're so pleased by the marks Miss Kean gives us that they don't care!"

"But we have to care about Kare!" Miyako tittered. "Care about Kare! Get it?"

Kaoru snickered. "Don't quit being a day student, Madonna."

- - -

The trio leisurely skimmed over the still South Pacific and the roughed snow-capped Andes and the flat brown pampas of southern South American in a half hour and soon dodged jetliners approaching a harbor metropolis.

"Look! Rio!" Buttercup called. "Just like in our school videos! Sugarloaf Mountain!"

"It's really just a big rock!" Blossom sighed with great disillusionment.

Suddenly their compacts beeped and pulsated. "Hey – look! Our compacts!" Bubbles said.

"The alert signal!" Buttercup quizzically noted, "But they shouldn't be doing that! We're way out of range from the lab!"

"Can't blame the professor," Blossom stressed, "He hacked our compacts into phones the best he could since he barely knows how they work anyway."

"So what's making them do this?" Bubbles asked.

"I know! Let's follow the signal!" Blossom said, flying in a circle till they found the strongest pulsating direction and flew south far outside the city along the coast.

Bubbles said, "Gee, we're flying fast and we're still no closer what's causing the signal."

"Must be awfully strong," Buttercup noted, firming herself up. "I think we can handle it, though."

"Diplomacy first, Buttercup!" admonished Blossom. "We're visitors, remember?"

"Hey, what city's that?" Bubbles said, pointing out a sprawling metropolis.

"Buenos Aries," Blossom said. "Look, there's Avenida 9 de Julio! Remember last month's lesson?"

"Oh yea, the widest street in the world, right?"

"They've got great Italian restaurant here I remember, and some Japanese ones too."

"Yea, that reminds me; we've been flying a long time," Buttercup hinted, rubbing her tummy just as their compacts emitted a long beep.

"It's way over there, those far hills!" Blossom cried steering southwest,

Suddenly a meteoric violet streak swooped across the horizon far ahead of them, momentarily taking the trio aback.

"Wow!!" Buttercup said. "What's that??"

"Look how fast it's going!" gasped Bubbles. "Is it a hawk? Is it a jet?"

Buttercup snickered. "Enough reinventioning, please?"

"It's headed for that forest! Com'on!!" Blossom said, soaring into the thick forests and landing under a canopy of trees.

Buttercup said, "Wow! It's wild under here!"

Bubbles pointed beyond a clearing; "What's that?"

The others turned to see a towering growling half-ape half-bear thing cornering a group of terrified campers cowering in a hollow under a cliff.

"What the frig is that??" Buttercup said.

"I haven't the slightest nightmare!" Blossom said.

Bubbles gasped. "It has a black aura!"

Buttercup clucked and reached behind for her mallet which made Bubbles materialize her bubble wand in unison. "It's clobbering time!"

Blossom pulled her back. "Wait! Look!" she said, pointing up to see descending through the trees like a floating bubble a slender leggy girl about fourteen or so in a curvy violet Powerpuff uniform with a violet heptagon cameo on her choker, her platinum-blond poodle ears roiling over her slim shoulders like twin silvery veils down to her slim elbows.

The trio gasped in awe. "Wow!!"

Buttercup wistfully shook her head. "Nice curves."

Bubbles breathlessly breathed, "She's – breathless!!"

"Huh!" Blossom chaffed, "Coming from you that's a heck of a compliment."

The girl in violet landed between the beast and the campers and brandishes her hand at the startled group to scram – which they did without any encouragement like bats out of hell.

"You again!!" The beast angrily roared like a dog growling at its food being taken away. "Haven't you dredged the bottom of your bag of tricks yet, little girl? Or maybe I've already adapted to all you've got! Let's see!!" and the beast shot a stream of eye-fire at the girl in violet.

"Watch out!!" Bubbles impulsively cried out just as the violet girl swiftly held out and cupped her hands together then opened them up like a clam and a bright glowing boomerang sprang out which whirled like a spinning fan shield before her, bouncing the beam back at the cringing beast to singe and smoke its fur.

Impressed, Buttercup nodded. "Cool tactics too!"

Staggering back, the beast recovered, red eyes glaring. "Curse you!" it hissed like a roaring lion deep a well, "The day will come when I have a piece of you, little maid! I will devour that soft luscious body with relish and it will be slow dining! So deliciously slow to savor your every scream and whine and cry for mercy!!"

It grabbed up a boulder and flung it at the girl who deftly dodged it light as a hummingbird then waved her bright boomerang toward the beast to first knock it on the head then circled it – all the while shining a white bright light at it.

"AGGGGGGHHHHHH!!"

The beast howled and shrank, shrank, shrank as a stream of black spores escaped it and borrowed deep into the ground and the boomerang dissolved in mid-air.

Blossom shook her head in fascination. "Wow! White energy as a weapon!"

"She's got that much to spare??" Bubbles said, watching the girl approach the now normal timid raccoon and knelt to gently pet it's smoking pelt then she suddenly started and stood up as the trio came out.

"Don't be scared," Blossom diplomatically began and the girl, composing from surprise suddenly looked abashed then zoomed off.

"Hey wait! We just want to talk!" Blossom cried in pursuit.

"Wow, she's fast!" Bubbles exclaimed.

"And shy!" Buttercup remarked. "We must've really spooked her, else it's my hair."

"Let's not make her think we're ganging up on her. If she turns that white light on us, it's a long way down," Blossom said, apprehensively.

"She won't do that," Bubbles confidently said. "See how gentle she was with that monster? She didn't even punch it!"

"I noticed that," Buttercup said, curious. "I mean we usually get one or two licks in before we use our weapons."

"Maybe having angelic looks like that's made her just as gentle too," Blossom suggested, leading them in trailing the girl in violet, never really catching up, but apparently wearing her down because she landed on a mountaintop and defensively cupped her hands and sprung forth a glowing four-armed combat staff.

"Easy, easy, we're friends!!" Blossom said, receiving a snort of disdain from the girl whose huge deep violet eyes were glaring. "We were just admiring your work."

"Yea!" Buttercup commented, "You handle white energy like a Rose Bowl majorette's baton! You ought teach me those moves!"

Bubbles whispered aside; "Maybe she doesn't understand Japanese here?"

"Er, right. Er – Cumprimentos! Nós somos amigas!" Mokomo said like a half-remembered lesson. "Meu nome é flor e este é buttercup e esta é bolhas!"

Bubbles asked Blossom, "Isn't it 'esta é bubbles'?"

"No, I'm sure it's 'esta é bolhas'."

"But that sounds silly! Anyone can tell 'este é buttercup' sounds just like her name!"

"Well, look at mine! I'm no 'flor'!"

"Then change your name too!"

"Alright, alright; 'esta é bubbles esta é blossom' then!"

"Stop murdering the Portuguese, uh? You'll start an international incident!" the girl in violet snapped with a harsh husky cowboy accent totally incongruous her soft voice and delicate beauty.

The trio were startled. "You speak English!" Blossom blurted.

"Sure! I'm from Dallas!" the girl in violet defensively said. "Where you from? Your English's got a funny dainty chipmunk accent."

"We're Japanese."

"Sure don't look it!"

Blossom chirped. "Wait till we pose! It'll explain everything, because – I'm Hyper Blossom!" she cried, jumping into pose.

Bubbles; "Rolling Bubbles!"

Buttercup: "Powered Buttercup!"

Trio posing together; "The Lovely Fighting Science Legend! Powerpuff Girls Z!!"

The girl in violet smirked. "Cute act – but this ain't Vegas. Yea, I once read something about you all in O Inquiridor Nacional."

Blossom perked, flattered. "Oh! Is that a real big newspaper here?"

"The National Enquirer," the girl in violet said, relaxing slightly as her glowing staff dissolved. "So you're all real, huh? What you doin' here this far?"

Bubbles seemed to wince every time the girl in violet spoke, as though every utterance she made slashed the Mona Lisa.

"Looking for you!" Blossom said.

"Well, you found me, so you can take off!" the girl in violet curtly said.

Blossom blurted, "Hey, we would've helped you with that spore beast, but the way you moved we'd just been in the way!"

The girl in violet snickered. "Help? Heck, the Creeper just would've had you all for breakfast!"

"Hey!" Buttercup snapped. "We've handled suckers ten times that size!"

"Huh!" the girl cockily snorted. "I mow my crabgrass early so pests never grow that far, babe! Besides, do you all have monsters who adapt to any weapon's first attack over there? Didn't think so! After getting first whacks and a bubble bath, he'd been over you all like Bill on Monica!"

Bubbles frowned with terminal disappointment; "Gee, you're so darn pretty – but your attitude's even worst than Buttercup!"

"What you mean?"

"She's the tomboy of our team!" Blossom said and the girl in violet looked at Buttercup funny and chuckled.

"Tomboy, huh? Cute as you?"

Buttercup growled. "Cute?? Cute?? Who ya callin' 'cute'??"

"You, babe! Heck, half the chicks in my school wish they looked nice as you!!"

Buttercup bridled and shoved her face at the girl. "I'm not 'pretty'! Or cute! Got it??"

The girl in violet looked amused for once. "Then you're blind, sister."

"Am not !!"

Blossom moved up. "Buttercup, it's a whole lot better than ugly, right?"

Bubbles admired the girl's looks. "In fact...I hate to say it, but I think you're the prettiest girl I ever sawl!"

The girl in violet snorted as though from a grievous insult. "Great! Just great! Freak! Look, I gotta go!"

"Why so fast?" Blossom said, "We want to talk to you."

"Ain't nothing to talk about! Everything's under control here! Just fly on home, will ya?"

Bubbles sourly sniffed. "Forget Buttercup. You almost act like a Rowdyruff!"

"Who?"

"A bunch of really jerky juvenile delinquents in training," Blossom ruefully said.

The girl in violet almost perked like her vanity had been stroked. "Yea? I come off like a dude even like this, huh? Least that's a relief!"

"I wouldn't exactly cluck about spoiling those looks by acting so butchy like that!" Bubbles complained.

"Hey, you can have it all if I could trade them for your powers, blondie!"

"But there's no need to! We're all sisters!" Blossom assured, making peace. "Look! We're all Powerpuff girls! Look at our uniforms!"

"Our fancy coiffeurs!" added Bubbles.

"Our awesome kick-ass weapons!" Buttercup said..

"We're the same!" Blossom finished then paused, jealously noticing the other's mildly mounded chest. "Er, a little more – mature maybe, but the same!"

"Not the same!" the girl in violet snapped vehemently.

"Yes we are!"

"No! I ain't like you! I ain't no –" the girl in violet cut herself off as though embarrassed.

"You're not what?" Blossom asked and the girl in violet fell quiet.

"Nothing! Just beat it!"

Buttercup groaned. "Look, we came a long way here to find you and I'm going to sit on your heels till we get some information out of you!"

"Didn't ask you to come! Just leave me alone!"

"But you don't have to be alone – not anymore!" Bubbles assuaged. "We're your friends! You can tell us things you can't tell anyone else. We know; we can't even tell our families about our super heroine lives! Tell us, please. At least give us your name if you have one?"

"What is this? Me Tarzan – you Jane? Of course I gotta name!" the girl in violet snapped, then hesitantly grumbled.

"Well?" asked Blossom.

"I'm getting to it, I'm getting to it! I'm... I'm... 'Blueberry'," she grudgingly uttered in a low abashed voice.

"Blueberry??" the trio chorused and Blueberry grimaced.

"Not so loud! Sheesh! That's what mom called me, not me!" Blueberry gushed with chagrin touched with pain and bitterness. "Only reason I use it is because it was one of her last words to me!"

"Oh. Sorry," Blossom apologized. "Please tell us more! Please! How did you get this way? Did a white light from the sky hit you?"

"Don't know what you're talking about."

"Well, how'd you get the way you are then?" Bubbles asked.

Blueberry shook her head. "You wouldn't believe me."

Buttercup retorted, "Hey! We're underaged girls who can fly without a plane and knock down buildings. How much more's a stretch to believe??"

Blueberry grumbled. "Ain't gonna tell no one, are you?"

"Maybe the professor –" Blossom admitted, "But we have to. He's like a dad and doctor for us...like he'll be for you too, Blueberry."

"Please stop calling me that, alright?"

"Why?" Bubbles asked. "It's a lovely name!"

"It's sissy fag!"

Buttercup snickered. "No sissier than 'Buttercup'!"

"You don't understand! It's way way worst for me!!"

"Worst? How??"

"Because I'm – !" Blueberry swiftly gnashed her coral lower lip like catching a slip. "Forget it. Look, I gotta split."

Blossom pleaded. "First tell us how you came to be!"

"Yes!" Bubbles said. "You must be itching to tell someone your secret!"

"Already got someone."

"We mean someone who's gone through it too – like us?" Blossom coaxed and Blueberry sighed and stepped away and turned her back as though half-ashamed yet anxious to relieve herself of a burden.

"My...my dad's a museum curator here, and sometimes he asks me to take people on a tour, you know, like on-the-job training he thinks? Anyway, during this storm last year, we had this group of knockout kid pageant winners in and I was showing them our exhibits and we stopped at this glass flask that grandpa found in Yokohoma where he was stationed when the war ended. He found it in a bomb crater which used to be some kind of library or something before he passed it on to dad."

Buttercup asked, "What's so special about an old flask?"

"It glowed, like it was radioactive, but the college said it was just phosphorus, still it looked pretty neat so dad kept in the collection. Anyway the chicks were checking it out when suddenly there was a crash from the skylight and a bolt of lightning came down and hit the flask. Scared the shit out of us, and I was surprised the flask was still in one piece except then it started glowing even harder, like a heartbeat, stronger and stronger, till you could hardly look at it, and I sensed it was going to explode or something so I – I threw myself over the girls closest to it and suddenly this big burst of light whacked me from behind like a big wave at the beach!..."

Blueberry stopped like she was collecting her thoughts or trying to forget. "Then I remember feeling all woozy and dazed and saw all those girls staring at me all funny...and I looked down, and saw – all this!" Blueberry said, waving hands over herself almost with self-disdain or shame. "I was scared and confused shit and ran back the office and tried to chill out and wake up, but I was still like this, all over. Dad came in and didn't believe it was me till I told him all about – er, anyway he believed me, and brought the flask in and shined it under a UV light to get a better look at it and that light turned me back to normal. Man, I was so happy I almost crapped on the floor!"

Blossom was fascinated. "A sun lamp made the flask glow a reverse transformation beam?"

"Just like the professor's gun!" Buttercup exclaimed.

"Is that still how you untransform?" Blossom asked, "Your compact can do it when you pose in reverse, you know."

"Er, I'm not all that into dancing," Blueberry demurred. "Besides it works both ways for me."

"You mean you don't need any Peach to transform??" Bubbles quizzically asked.

"Peaches? I'm allergic to peaches."

Blossom said, "She means do you have a pet or toy who cries for you to transform?"

Blueberry chuckled. "A pet crying for me? Like talk? Heck, if I did its ass would be in the circus and me and dad would be millionaires!"

"I suppose there wouldn't be anyway, since Peach got changed in the same explosion that first transformed us," Blossom thought aloud. "Blueberry –"

"AGGGHHH!!"

"Sorry. Er, Just how long have you been a Powerpuff?"

"Huh, almost two years I guess."

"Even longer than us!" Bubbles blurted.

Blossom nodded. "So your monsters didn't come from the black light that the Chakichaki Musume sacked in Edo then."

"Cha-Cha-Cha what??"

"Powerpuffs from ancient Japan. They're the ones that your flask created, Blu – er, Berry."

The girl in violet impulsively gasped. "Barry??"

"No, I said 'Berry'. Isn't that better than calling you Blu -- er, by the whole name?"

The girl relaxed like a sigh and sheepishly tittered. "Oh! 'Berry'. Oh, yea, I get it. Er, sure that's – that's cool."

"So have you ever seen Kare, Berry?"

"Care? About what?"

"A bad evil demon with a forked tail and overboiled lobster hands!" Bubbles said with a shudder.

"O yea, I saw something like that at New Orleans before you had to use a snorkel!"

"Not Mardi Gras! We mean here, for real!"

"Real? No, nothing freaky like that. Spores turning flora and fauna into rejects from chiller theater are weird enough – but there used to be lots devil stuff going on these parts in the ancient days when the Inca and Toltecs were running around tearing peoples' hearts out. You can see it in all the old temples and pyramids."

"So maybe Kare was here and fried everyone outta town and moved across the sea for more suckers to terrorize," Buttercup said and Blossom nodded and asked Blueberry;

"Did your black spore monsters only start appearing after you first transformed?"

"Uh...around then, yea I guess, and they just keep coming like the Chinese Army."

"What made you think stopping them was your job anyway?" Buttercup asked and Blueberry's face suddenly went pained and bitter again.

"'Cause the friggin' shits made it my job!"

Blossom sensed it'd be more than rude to pursue that line, besides it was painful to hear talk like that from such a delicate-looking stunner. "We're just trying to find out where the live spores here came from."

"Yea," Buttercup said. "Especially since Kare leaves them lying around like dust bunnies."

"Not as cute as real bunnies though!" Bubbles added.

Rolling eyes, Buttercup continued, "You'd thought he'd call on them to help him out when we sacked his ass into space but I guess he didn't have time or was too busy chilling out to."

"But where were they all this time?" Blossom asked.

"Maybe they were sleeping," Bubbles commented. "There're lots of old things and places to hide in a museum."

"Yea, sure are!" Blueberry nodded as though long suspecting it. "Hey, you're smart too, gorgeous!"

Bubbles blushed. "Aw..."

"Flukes happen," Buttercup quipped. "So when the lightning crashed in the burst of white light didn't just transform you, Blue, but zapped alive any spores around you. But I don't get it, why would some old flask transform you anyway?"

"Because it wasn't phosphorus in that flask – it was 'Kennaium He'!" Blossom surmised.

"'Kennaium He'??" Bubbles quizzically blurted. "But only Kennai Hiraga made that!"

"Exactly! Blueberry's –"

"PLEASE!!"

"Oh, bad slip, Berry. Your grandfather must've found the flask in the bomb rubble where Kennai had his workshop back in Edo times! There must've been residues of 'Kennaium He' left in the flask he used to first make it. For all we know the insides may've been caked with it! And like nuclear energy, just a little goes a long way!"

Buttercup nodded. "Yeah, that makes sense! And the lightning jump-started it to flare up with white energy! Boy, the Professor's sure going to be surprised to learn that iceberg didn't have all the stuff!"

Blossom said to Blueberry. "It also explains why you're so powerful, Berry. You got zapped by the original pure 'Kennaium He' from the same flask it was created in. Ours came from the 'Kennaium He' Kennai used to line the trunk holding the bag of Kare's black energy before Ken exploded it apart."

"I get it," agreed Buttercup. "Over time that 'He' would've lost a little strength fighting to keep Him's black energy sealed in the bag."

"So that means there're no black light monsters here either, right?" asked Bubbles.

"Then, the spores here are a lot different the ones we're used to," Blossom guessed. "I'm guessing that this 'Creeper' is your 'Mojo Jojo' here, right – er, Berry?"

"Mojo who?"

"A warped twisted murderous little chimp in a psychedelic turban who wants to rule the world."

"Oh, you mean Osama Bin Laden!"

"No, the saner ape in Tokyo City!" Bubbles said, "You have to see him for yourself, Berry! Why don't you come back with us?"

"Back??" Blueberry suddenly turned skittish.

"For a visit!" Blossom concurred. "We can cruise the malls, raid candy stores, whack the chimp, and you can see the professor for a Puff orientation, morality lecture, and full medical examination even though he's no M.D. Just watch out for his Pap smear."

"In Japan? I ain't flying way over there!"

"Only takes us a couple of minutes. He'd be delighted to see you."

Blueberry suddenly looked almost terrified. "Nuh-huh! I ain't meeting no dude! No way, no how!!"

"Why? You got something 'gainst guys?" Buttercup asked and Blueberry almost snickered aloud.

"Man, if only you knew! Look, I – I gotta split. I hung out here too long anyway."

"Too long?" asked Blossom. "You put the creature away in only a minute, and you must've gotten here just a couple after you sensed black spores were here, right?"

"I – just don't like being – like this too long," Blueberry anxiously said, fidgeting. "I just do the job and get back to normal pronto, Tonto."

"Why don't you stay out longer? It's fun getting to know what you can do!"

"For you maybe..." Blueberry floated up. "Look, I gotta go!"

"Wait Berry! Can't we see you again – soon?" Blossom pleaded and Blueberry hesitated.

"Alright, here tomorrow this time – just for a few minutes, but no promises!"

"We'll be here," Blossom promised and they watched Blueberry streak off. Awed, Blossom shook her head. "Wow! Was she here or what??"

"Just a snotty silver-haired pretty-faced show-off!" Buttercup wryly quipped. "Bet I can arm wrestle Tinkerbelle's sassy little butt off any day!"

"Wonder why she's so skittish to leave us?" Bubbles asked. "I thought she'd be happy to see she's not all alone!"

"More like antisocial!" quipped Buttercup, shaking her head. "Man! And you two call me butchy!"

"What do you mean?"

"Notice the way gorgeous was slyly checking us out all the time? How she kept glancing at our legs and chests? She's a lesbie sure as rain."

"That's not fair! She's way too beautiful to be queer!" Bubbles protested. "Though I admit, she's the first girl I've met who makes you look like a ballerina!"

"I think she's hiding something from us." Blossom admitted.

"She sounds totally sincere to me," Bubbles said. "Crude and boorish, but honest."

"I didn't mean in a mean way. She just seems – totally embarrassed about herself somehow."

"How can she be embarrassed having looks like that?? It's almost – unnatural!"

"Yea, I know. She's almost too pretty to be true...pretty. Pretty girls..." Blossom snapped her fingers. "Beautiful girls!"

"Huh??" Bubbles and Buttercup chorused.

"She threw herself over those pageant girls to protect them from the flask's exploding, remember? The white light must've made her transform absorb the beauty of all those girls, just like how it created our weapons from the toys belonging to those kids who we protected from it!"

Buttercup nodded. "So that's why she has no real weapon – but uses white energy instead!"

"Ah! That makes better sense why she acts so totally opposite from the way she looks!" Bubbles said. "She could really be a frumpy grumpy plain Jane bookworm who's bitter from not getting hit by guys! Girls with looks grace magazines not haunt museums!"

Buttercup shook her head. "Then why does she hate such a generous overhaul? I mean I'd stay a puff all day and night strutting my stuff if I were her – and that's saying something!"

"It's a puzzle," Blossom agreed, pausing. "It's funny, but when she looked at you and talked, you kind of get the impression that you're with a...a..."

"Dyke princess?" Buttercup put in with a snort but Blossom shook her head.

"No. Like...naw, that's crazy. It's just that there's something about her that's normal, yet misplaced. I can't explain."

"Well, what I know is I'm hungry!" Buttercup put in. "Let's check out the tacos."

"That Spanish for octopus puffs??" Bubbles wondered.

- - -

Blueberry weaved through forested hills, her almost frantic bee-line home slowing as anxiety waned to the onrushing wind stream skimming and softly caressing her creamy perfect skin, quietly suffusing her with tingling waves mellowing her qualms with a soft inner glow. Breathlessly titillated, she languorously sighed and rolled on her back like the clouds were her mattress and closed her feathery eyelashes and gently stroked her arms and legs like in a bubble bath, softly giggling as she luxuriated the sensation, indulging a wild amnesic wonder of sensuous self-exploration – rudely jarred by a screaming jet overhead.

Blinking abashed and sheepishly dismayed by her near self-seduction, she anxiously dashed toward Buenos Aries' sprawling outskirts and swooped into a classy mixed European neighborhood to land light as a feather in an alley behind a museum and began pacing almost in frustration and anxiety.

"Alright, let's change!" Blueberry said aloud to herself as though trying to coax and convince herself to. "Com'on, I DO want to change, darn it!! I still wanna be who I am! I do!!"

A commotion from the street down the alley turns her head to see passing on the sidewalk a smug husky junior high jock strutting with three fawning tittering girls, the sight of the handsome jock making Blueberry sharply catch her breath as a shot of wild delicious swimmy weakness welled her chest.

"O no!'

"Oh – ohhhhhh...Chuuuuccck!!..." Blueberry dreamily sighed as a warm swoony smile crossed her face and she drifted toward the sidewalk, but her boot accidentally kicked an empty can whose loud clatter ricocheting off garbage cans down the alley snapped her out of her wild ditzy daze and she gasped aback in appall and shame.

"What the frig am I doing?? Stop it!!" she cried, banging her head against the brick wall. "Stop it! Stop it! I wanna be me again!! I want to! Want to! Really want to!!" She steels herself with her hands at her sides like she's psyching up with a desperate grappling passion. "Alright, alright! Longer later, okay? Way longer, deal, ego?? Okay, let me be, okay? Let's do this! Count of three! One...two...three!!"

Shaking with effort, her eyes squeeze tight as her pretty face crinkles like she's straining before she blurts and yells –

"AYYYYYYYYY MMMMMMAAAAAAA GUUUUUYYYYYY!!"

A blinding violet flash floods the alley and in Blueberry's place stands a tall and husky denim-clad dark-haired junior high jock worthy of a harem like Chuck, only now he gasps and grimaces in pain because the violet PPGZ belt that once fitted so snugly around Blueberry's tiny tapered waist is now crushing his like a vice while his fingers frantically scratched at its buckle latch.

"Owwwwwww! Oww! Oww!!" he gasps and yelps, managing to unhook the crushing belt then slumps against the brick wall in exhaustion, wiping sweat off his brow with relief and dismay.

"Oh Man, that was close! Almost lost it! And over Chuck! My own knucklehead buddy!! Freak, took some friggin' tin can to snap me out of it – just because it feels so snug an' awesome the other way! Hey guy, what are you – chopped liver?? Man! Is all this super shit worth it? Maybe I ought to go cold turkey from all this while I'm still a dude!"

Faint squawking overhead made him look up at a passing flock of ducks and he bit his lip as he held up the belt and sighed and gathered himself the museum's rusty rear exit door but it's stuck and he tries all his strength. "Freak! Can't believe it! I can chuck this whole building a mile as a chick, but can't even budge a stupid rusty door–!!"

And the door gives way and he nearly falls backward then mutters and enters the museum's rear storeroom and puts the belt inside an Egyptian urn and picks up his school books and moves into an office crammed and cluttered with shelves stuffed with scrolls and artifacts and old books stacked everywhere and even the desk where his grey-bearded bespectacled father was deep into an ancient manuscript then looked up.

"Don't say you've been out jogging, Barry!" Elmer Jennings chided and Barry blushed.

"Just – on patrol, dad."

"'Just'?" the elder said with a suspicious look that made Barry blush.

"Com'on dad, I'm home, ain't I?"

"I suspect just barely 'I'."

"Gee whiz, I take a couple more minutes than normal and you're already sizing me up for a prom dress!"

"You're taking a risk making 'detours' like this, Barry. I don't like your being Blueberry a second longer than you have to."

"Someone's gotta do it, dad! I mean, had I known about the dark spores before I started fooling around with the belt then mom would still be here, right?..." he reminded his suddenly sober father, then guilty for that Barry perked up; "Besides, I had a great excuse! Guess what? I met them!"

"'Them'?" his dad looked puzzled then surprised. "Here??"

"Yup! All three of them, and man are they cute! Man, if I hung around them all the time, I wouldn't have to worry about any girlie feelings taking over!"

"Then I'd have to worry about them!" Elmer quipped, sitting back intrigued. "Why are they here?"

"I dunno. Maybe they finally found out that you've fixed my – Blueberry's compact to tap in on their chatter and stuff on the sly."

"Well, it was inevitable I suppose. Do they know your secret?"

"Kiddin'?? I'd rather confess to a bunch of girls that I'm really a fairy than I turn into a chick even better than them!"

"That's good to hear, that you still feel so strongly about your virility after being so steeped in estrogen, son."

"Hey, go ask the Creeper whether girl juice made me any marshmallow! The Puffs were real impressed!"

"Well, they could sure use some lessons in preempting spores in the bud before they start chewing up cities. Still, it would be nice if they could take the load off you here once a while before Blueberry becomes too – 'addictive'."

Barry blushed again and flopped on a chair. "Com'on dad, that's bull! I just get my kicks off having super powers, not off being a chick! What do you take me for, a sissy werido freako?? I mean, I haven't even see myself – her naked!"

"And don't even try – and it's nothing to do with my being prudish!" Elmer staunchly admonished. "The transformation is far more complete and deeper than you know, Barry, The only thing XY about you in Blueberry's form is your mind. Even her brain's totally female – along with powerful female instincts and feminine wiles which will try to squeeze and mold any mind seated in it to its natural configuration. Remember 'Call of The Wild'?"

Barry smirked. "Since when haven't you made me memorize every word? You really think I'd jump the fence just from being a chick for a couple of minutes?? Get real!" he balked then shrank a little before shrewder eyes. "Okay, sure, I kinda feel that happening a little, especially when it guides my moves fighting the spores – but I'm not dropping jockey briefs for panties anytime soon!"

"Doesn't help your resistance either when you 'explore' that other self, son," Elmer tactfully said and Barry cackled.

"Heck, you sayin', dad? That I get my jollies off being Blueberry??"

"I'm talking to a young man who's been peeking on little girls since kindergarten and who's now been plunked inside an adolescent jock's dream!"

Barry blushed and shrugged. "Okay, okay, so I stroke mysel – er, Blueberry a little now and then – but what guy wouldn't in my place, huh? I mean, I'm just – curious about how different it is, like an – an experiment!"

"Which can blow up in your face one day. That's why you must also never never allow Blueberry to face her reflection long or her public like the PowerPuff Z lavishly do. Flattery fed you in her state will seduce your ego and genetic male allegiance but good."

"Com'on dad! I'm a straight arrow red-blooded red-white-and blue dude through and through! I'd never ever give that up for a short short skirt and nice long legs and cute bouncy boobs I haven't even seen yet!"

"Barry, you might fancy yourself a jock and God's gift to junior high girls, but that self-esteem's not as rock solid as you think. You sensed it when you first went weak-kneed seeing Blueberry in the mirror; she's several fold more beautiful than you're handsome, and one day vanity's going to judo that cocky male ego and your will and desire to turn back into a boy is going to be as hard as convincing Yolanda Jarvis that she's one too."

"Aw, com'on dad! Even if I screwed up that bad – which I won't – I'd still be me. Kinda."

"I'd have a stunning new daughter with a macho mind – briefly, but soon enough she really wouldn't be the same, son," Elmer soberly said, waving at some X-rays and microcircuit diagrams of the Powerpuff compact pinned on a crowded corkboard. "That's why I'm working so hard on these."

Barry looked dubious. "You really think you can re-set the compact to make me a Powerguy instead of a Powerpuff?"

Elmer sat back on his chair and lit his tobacco pipe and puffed. "It's one thing turning part of a miniaturized matter transmuter into a mere transceiver like Utonium did, and reinitializing its primary transmutation snapshot. In fact, I'm surprised the 'compacts' are so resilient to allow such tinkering by primitives as we and still function. You'd think Utonium would be raptly curious of how and why it can convert a mortal into a superbeing and create proto-matter out of seemingly empty space instead of going off building mega bots and exo-suits. I guess it's the water over there. As for myself, as a retired professor of archeology as well of quantum physics, I have a greater view of the possibilities."

"Like what?" Barry asked and Elmer paused a long while to puff at a astrolabe.

"My past research in the vague origins of the legendary belts of the Amazons and the Greek goddess Artemis leads me to believe that we're dealing with the products of an ancient but extremely advanced race."

"Aliens?"

"Or time or extra-dimensional travelers or even a prehistoric supercivilization. What ever case, Powerpuffs are actually the fluke benefactors of a hyper-technology designed for a very different purpose. I'm coming to the conclusion that Substance 99 – or 'Chemical Z' as Utonium calls it – is actually a kind of sub-atomic matter transmutational template."

"You mean like some kind of weird DNA?"

"Really are learning something in school besides feminine figures, uh?"

Barry chuckled. "Well, I'm actually just trying to get to know their minds now, since girl watching isn't the same thrill it used to be!"

"My poor spoiled mannered son! Anyway, that's a good analogy. For a better term, Substance 99 is a kind of 'seed' if you will, containing within its subatomic structure the full blueprints to both hyper-energerize any being and materialize a 'compact' matter transmuter and costumes by condensing and weaving local magnetic fields into proto-matter once provided an impulse of energy."

"Sounds so off-the-wall wild!"

"Well, you can barely see the seed of a sequoia tree, right? Theoretically, you can blueprint New York City down to the last bolt and paper clip in a molecular crystal lattice smaller than a grain of rice – and in another the self-generating matter transmuter to create it. But that's all Substance 99 can do; stamp out superbeings from local materials like a cookie cutter. The real action is in its creations."

"Yea, you got a point. Sure explains how old Kennai Hiraga was using hyper-future technology in Japan so far back."

"And why his girls were irreversibly transformed as superbeings without compacts; there was no high technology in the area to generate the electric fields needed for Substance 99 to reap and create a device as complex as a compact's matter transmuter."

"That makes sense, but where do you think he got the stuff to begin with?"

"Now that's the 64,000 question! Perhaps he stumbled over a meteorite containing it or a piece of an alien craft or just saw it materialize from empty space-time, who knows?"

"Yea, from who? And why??"

Elmer clucked. "Well, speculations can run wild."

"Then you're good at that! That's why Los Alamos kicked you out, for daydreaming over nuclear engine designs, right?"

"Thanks for the kick down memory lane, son. But as for a speculation, just imagine an advanced race long long ago far far away which knows how to create super soldiers – not by lengthy recruiting and training and outfitting, but by using a substance containing the means to transform an ordinary being at electronic speeds into hyper-beings with minds programmed with advanced battle tactics to use with any weapon? Soldiers with electric-eel type organs which can generate skin-tight auras of mega-force fields that not only protects them from physical duress and mega-amplifies their every muscular motion like an invisible exo-skeleton, but can even locally concentrate and repulse a planet's magnetic field to levitate and fly by under mind-control. I'm pretty sure I'm not too far off that's the original design of Substance 99."

"Sounds cool to me! And some of the stuff got away from them or they just lost it or something?"

"Something like that. Fortunately this hypertechnology's only found its way here into the hands of juveniles with ethical mentors, but I'll need years of study to reach a more solid conclusion resembling the truth."

"Why not join Utonium? Two eggheads fry better than one."

Elmer demurred. "I'd rather wait."

Barry sighed. "Still afraid you'll get all your ideas ripped off again?" he asked and was instantly sorry by the wince on his father's face, for bringing up the reason for his father's remote retirement and by later result the death of his wife. "Sorry dad. I just figured this Utonium might be different from the guys you worked with at the lab, especially since his chicks seem to trust him like a dad. In fact maybe I should meet the guy. After all he knows I'm real now. Well, Blueberry is."

"Out of the question. You've never been Blueberry more than ten minutes at a stretch and you're talking hours away at the minimum?"

About to balk, Barry reflected the struggle in the alley, the tug of war between his macho ego and the deliciously new vanity of being a bewitchingly lovely girl whose charm was magnified more by unique super-powers. Only sheer willpower managed to break that budding feminine self-esteem by conning himself that he'd return to that new self – which he did. Too regularly. He already intimately knew more of the sense and sensation of being a female far beyond the comprehension of any staunchly heterosexual male, and the emasculating delight nibbled at his male ego far more than he admitted. He recalled his reaction at merely glimpsing Chuck – his best buddy – only Blueberry's instinctive inverse of that regard stunned and shocked him, like a sudden brief lick of puppy love.

Dangerous.

Being Blueberry's dangerous because my thrill and awe being her can win me over and it'll be bye-bye Barry. It's creepy enough feeling her bod helping my thoughts and moves fighting spores, and while that's great it's also like a ghost waiting to seep my mind and color me sissy. I don't wanna give up all those awesome powers like flying and mega-strength and knocking the snot outta monsters, but it's like there's a bear trap getting to them! Dad's right; When I first started it felt weird having a chick's bod, but I still felt like I was a guy, but the more I get used to being Blueberry I'm starting to feel like it's almost just as normal as being a guy.

So what happens when it's not 'almost' anymore?

Man, I gotta watch it!

"Okay dad, dump that idea. I can meet him myself in secret and flash him Blueberry as proof without his girls knowing squat. I really think I should, dad. I was fighting it while talking to them, but I – my Blueberry feelings felt kinda – close and relieved, like those chicks were my sisters."

"I'll – consider it," Elmer demurred, puff his pipe while mulling his son. "When was the last time you took Yolanda out to the movies?"

"Uh...last month? Com'on, dad! 'We're just fourteen' – like you keep telling me!"

"Old enough. Take her out tonight."

"Tonight??"

"When a red-blooded American junior jock start saying that girl watching's not the thrill it was anymore it's time to hang up that belt and get out with a girl you can face to face without a mirror!"

END OF CHAPTER ONE?


	2. Chapter 2

**Blueberry - Chapter 2**

by Dee Eon

"Tinkerbelle stood us up!!" Buttercup railed on the mountain top at the crack of dawn. "We fly back here twelve thousand miles to watch Bubbles rap with chipmunks and squirrels for three hours in the dark and my stomach's growling for lunch – all for a princess beauty parlor no-show while I'm missing a soccer tournament!"

Blossom was more compromising; "Well, she obviously has issues and is royally stuck-up. Then, maybe there's a conflict in her schedule."

"Perhaps it's a time zone thing, since the sun's just coming up here?" Bubbles suggested, like all of them missing the tongue of dark spores peeking from behind a rock.

Buttercup snorted; "This sucks! Either she's gonna join us or stay the lone sheriff in Dodge!"

"Buttercup, she's done pretty good all this time without our help, so give her a break, uh?" Blossom said.

Bubbles proposed; "Maybe she's still grooming before seeing us. You know how long that takes!"

Buttercup snickered. "Nope! I don't know 'bout you guys, but I'm tired of all these bugs and this chill and I gotta go to a REAL bathroom, so I'm going home!"

"Just a couple more minutes!" Blossom implored.

"You've been saying that like Big Ben since we got here! Look, Little Miss Universe didn't really want to see us from the get-go – at least all together..."

"Don't start on that, Buttercup! We barely know about her – life!"

"True," Bubbles concurred, shivering, "She might be butchy and pretty as sin, but she has a good heart. I say we give her time to get used to the idea of having Puff sisters."

"Like a decade?" quipped Buttercup, shrugging. "Sounds good to me! Let's just drop off the professor's Valentine and split!"

Blossom sighed and unhooked a little transceiver from her belt and found a small hollow in a tree to stow it then pressed its button and all three winced and cupped their ears in the early morning quietness.

Buttercup cried. "Ow! Man, every dog in Buenos Aries must be howling!"

"So long as Blueberry hears the beep too so she could use this to talk to the professor for a shoulder to cry on!"

"Oh, you're so sentimental!" Bubbles said with a sniffle, and with Blossom lifting off after Buttercup for the western skies.

Slithering out like a flying snake, the dark spores found and curled around the radio like a boa constrictor and the device erupted like the Fourth of July while a deep bass rumbled like a lion down a deep well;

"You shall all meet your end soon enough, bitchettes...and by your own!"

- - -

"Sure you're the same Barry Jennings from seventh grade last year??" Yolanda teased as he poured maple syrup over his Belgium waffles at their International House of Pancakes table with fellow eighth-graders jock Chuck Spencer and his spare babe Susanne Harris. "Like, wasn't blueberry your favorite syrup?"

Barry weakly chuckled at the junior high knockout beside him and patted his tummy. "Uh, just – cutting back on sweets."

"Yea – and pumping pecs so much in the gym that the teach thinks he's on steroids!" chaffed Chuck and Barry sniggered.

"What's wrong with keepin' yourself fit?" retorted Barry.

"Hey dude, it's like you're tryin' to impress more than any chicks by the way you've been hitting weights all term! Maybe since girls are easy knock-overs now, you're tryin' to woo the fairies too!"

Barry smirked by a mindless slight. "Don't call them that, alright?"

"Oooo! Suddenly so sensitive!" Chuck gibed, "Sure wasn't so soft last year, trippin' sissies in the hall and stairways!"

Barry blushed then guiltily mumbled. "Maybe they can't help being the way they are. They're just – born that way, so why slam them? I mean, wish I'd looked like Leonardo DiCaprio with zits."

"Well, you're just handsome enough for some!" Yolanda teased, nodding with fresh approval. "Yea, you really are different this year. Before you were a grunt shy of being a Neanderthal in a gang I wouldn't go near even with remote control, and now you're almost a gentleman."

"Yea, man," Chuck put in. "You've mellowed down so much it's friggin' scary!"

Barry's dismissive chuckle masked a deep denied dread; 'Damn! Blueberry's tenderizing my friggin' mind more than I thought! Sure hope I don't walk funny too!' He shrugged; "Naw, you're all just imagining things!"

Susan added. "Not your straight 'A's since last term! Sometimes I think you're holding back to keep from skipping grades just to stay in our school."

Barry chuckled and rolled eyes at Yolanda; "Now why would I do that?? Naw, dad just made me buckle down studying and cut back my weekend football practice, that's all. I ain't no egghead, like him! Mean, I'm just a another normal guy!"

"I don't know about that!" Yolanda said demure admiration. "Aren't you supposed to be out tomorrow in the slums at the mayor's speech or something – on a Saturday??"

Chuck cackled. "Oh wow! Real normal!"

"Hey, it's for my civics term paper!" Barry asserted, "I gotta check out the mayor's earthquake urban renewal dedication in East Aries! I mean, I'm gonna major in Social Science in high school next year so I'm getting in some points!"

"Booorrrring!" chaffed Susanne, digging a finger into her cheek. "Maybe what you ought to do instead is to make a book report on the mayor messing 'round with all his coed interns!"

"Least the guy ain't married, right?" Barry blurted with unexpected defensiveness. "I mean, not everything's exactly what the papers say 'bout – anything! Give the guy a break!"

"Oh? Hiding a skirt chasing past yourself, handsome??" Yolanda teased and Barry smirked.

"Had my friggin' full of short drafty skirts!" he muttered, hastily adding, "Mean, chicks are way nicer cuter in jeans, right?"

Chuck chuckled; "Well, since you'll be watching the ol' lech whitewash his scandal, guess that means you're passing up going to see 'Don't Go Into The Basement Part Four' at the movies with us tomorrow, huh?"

Groaning in surprise, Barry slapped his head and Chuck laughed; "Hey, it's okay, dude! There's enough of me to share with Yolanda too!"

"Neggie jocko! Tomorrow I'll be attending the police barbecue at our polo club!" Yolanda parried to Chuck's smirk – who was promptly elbow-jabbed by a frowning Susanne.

"What's so special 'bout some hoity toity barbecue 'cept ribs that you can't get along with popcorn?" Chuck asked.

"Oh, it's real special because it's daddy's getting a big promotion from his college gig!" Yolanda proudly clucked. "All kinds of V.I.P. types are coming and more!"

"Promotion?" asked Susanne.

"Yup! To that special phenomena unit of Dr. Luis Delgado's that's on the news sometimes!"

Barry chuckled, attacking his waffles. "You mean the 'S' Files? Sorry. Glad he's moving up – really. I can relate to weird shit too."

"So what's his hang?" asked Chuck and Yolanda eagerly replied;

"Well, it's daddy's job with Delgado to bust urban legends and myths so that people and politicians can concentrate on more important issues. He says teachers and schools spend humongous time and money trying to get kids to unlearn false and misleading facts! For example, his first priority's investigating all these UFP rumors."

Susanne asked. "UFP?"

"Unidentified flying person, like all those flying violet girl sightings lately?"

Barry nearly gagged on his waffle bite like a punch in the gut.

"Yo. dude!" Chuck japed. "Bug in your buns??"

Barry sheepishly chuckled. "Uh, er – went down the wrong way."

"It's all bogus if you ask me!" Susanne chirped, "Just like all those puffy girl reports from Japan in the National Inquirer. A blue-haired butch, a bubble blonde and a redhead with a scimitar hairdo who knock some monkey around? Please!"

Chuck nodded. "Yea, I read that it's something in the water over there too! But I saw some fuzzy cell shots of the chick who's in on this Photoshop con on MySpace, and she ain't bad even blurry – 'specially those legs!"

Barry blushed like an overboiled lobster while nibbling a sausage.

Yolanda shook her head. "Well daddy's got all kinds of secret reports too. Even a clear video of her up real close!"

Barry coughed.

"Daddy says he's going to analyze that video ten ways to Sunday to show how the special effects were done and maybe even identify who it is!"

Barry broke into a hacking cough.

"Yo, buddy! Need a little Heimlich maneuvering?"

"Just – too dry!" Barry asserted, ripping into his cranapple juice.

"You know, I heard the people who say they've seen this violet babe say she's one ultra looker if you really believe that shit," japed Chuck. "Half the dudes on the team are taking bounty bets on huntin' an' humpin' her one!"

Barry snickered. "Don't be gross."

"Gross – 'bout wanting some?"

"Just meant – it's not polite talking like that 'round girls."

"Oh? Suddenly the gentleman, uh?" chaffed Susanne. "You've sure become a closet feminist these past months, Barry. All this sudden super respect for girls, even doggy ones! If you had a sister to protect I'd understand, but..."

"I just – got a new appreciation for chicks now, that's all. I mean, they're way more than just long legs an' bouncy boobs and a nice face to strut to the mall with to impress any phony jocks!" Barry issued to the started and admiring looks of the girls who exchanged impressed looks.

Susanne tittered. "My, Yolanda! Like, has Sir Walter Raleigh been pulling out your chair yet??"

"I'm hoping!" Yolanda tittered, rising. "Don't nip my bacon, guys! Just tripping the powder room!"

"Me too," Susanne said, sauntering off in a giggling huddle with Yolanda.

"Why do they all always have to go together??" Barry wondered then noticed Chuck's funny stare. "What?".

"Man, puberty must be soaping your brains, dude!" Chuck quipped, then slyly adding as he nibbled an onion ring; "So...when are you asking Suzy to the junior prom, uh??"

Barry winced, knowing Chuck really didn't need to smugly ask that but was just twisting the needle in his buddy. Barry wanted to petulantly retort with fire but something hazy dampened that impulse, something beyond mere admiration of a rival jock and best friend who though crass was actually a pretty nice guy. A cute guy. A guy any chick would want...

Barry sighed with mindless wistfulness tinged with somber longing – then jolted as his male ego kicked this ass;

'WHOA!!' he inwardly blurted in appall and chagrin at his sudden marshmallow affliction; 'Shit!! Wrong with me?? It almost felt like back in the alley when I – Blueberry spotted him strutting with those chicks! Freak! Her pink brain's friggin' messing with my mind! He's my best buddy, damn it! Buddy! Why can't Blue just think of him that way too?? I mean can't chicks have any guy-friends without feeling all mushy-weaky like this – that??'

Barry anxiously pushed the damning wild feeling from his mind, aided by the heat of the topic of the moment.

"Was gonna take Yolanda before you hijacked her!" he tartly muttered. "Why don't you take Susanne instead so you won't have to hurt her feelings from not asking her?"

"Ain't 'hijacking' nobody, dude!" Chuck asserted; "It's all in black and white posted up since forever in the gym office and the student rec room! The star quarterback's obligated to give the Homecoming Queen first dance."

Barry smirked. "Yea, and knowing you you'll be hogging her dances like the EverReady rabbit!"

"Aw, you're not jealous that I'll move in on her for summer and high school too, are you?"

"Ain't jealous! Only reason you're the school's top quarterback's because I sprained my ankle while jogging just before that All Star game!"

"Hey, that's the breaks, dude! Hey, don't worry, I'll make sure she won't miss you."

"Mother! I worked my ass off all year getting Yolanda's favor, and you get first dibs struttin' her by the guys by fluke! If you had any real courtesy you'd pass on her as a tribute for my injury! You can do that!"

"Hey, can't buck tradition for a mercy date, dude! What would everyone say?"

"'Everyone.' Right!" Barry bitterly snorted. "Some 'buddy'! After all the shit sweeping I did for you, like keeping you out of detention for letting air out the principal's tires and tossing that M-80 into the teacher's bathroom!"

"Hey, my hands are tied, guy! I mean the whole school's expecting the top quarterback and home run King to break-dance with the homecoming Queen – and you don't want me to let 'em all down by breaking tradition, do you??" japed Chuck, then jesting; "Unless I score a super awesome knockout even better than her – when pigs fly!"

"Real cold, man! Pluto cold!" Barry muttered, drowning bitterness behind cranapple juice before something wild sprang into his head. Something so desperately insanely wild that only true love would've allowed considering it. A sly smile spread his lips. "Uh...well, just suppose you did meet – a chick just like that just before the prom. Would you pass on Yolanda then?"

Chuck smirked. "Dump Yolanda?? Hey. what'ja you take me for, huh? She's not just a fox but a friend too!"

"Com'on, I'm talking hypo, guy! She's my friend too! Just asking – man to man – if you would if she didn't know squat so her feelings wouldn't be hurt, if a really awesome looker came up to you and asked you to the prom, you know?"

"Came up to me??" Chuck blurted as though his sheer charisma was wooed by the notion of an effortless dream date, then with mock modesty shrugged. "Well...like you said, Yolanda's a real angel – and friend – but just between us, IF there really was a nicer chick – a WAY nicer chick that sashayed up and asked me, maybe I might – think her proposal over – to be polite, you know?"

Barry grinned like a shark. "So you would swap dates just before the junior prom if you really met someone like that."

"I said IF – and there's no one like that in the whole neighborhood, right?"

"Well...suppose there was someone just like that floating around; would you give your word to swap Yolanda?"

"My word??"

"Well, why not? I mean, if you're so friggin' sure – just like me – that Yolanda's the foxiest thing walking and can't be beat, it's a dumb bet, right?"

"Bet huh? Tryin' to set me up with someone?"

"What does it matter?"

"Ain't no third cousin with braces is it?"

"No cousins or nothing! Look, you can check her out right before the prom and decide for yourself!"

"Yeah? So what do I get besides Yolanda when Miss Dream Babe turns out Miss Bow-Wow, huh?"

"I'll be your slave all summer after graduation."

"What?? You're friggin' with me!"

"Nope. Even if you turn her down. MY word!"

Chuck skeptically snorted. "You're pulling my leg, dude! Nothing's that sure!"

Barry slung an arm around his buddy's shoulders. "Look ol' buddy, when the team sees you strutting the mall with – her on your arm, they're not gonna have dry underwear all week! Like, I'm talking legs a mile high up a short short breezy skirt, nice bouncy jugs, dangerous curves and one awesome face that'll pop your zipper! Believe me, I know!"

"Uh! If she's so super bang-up delicious why don''t you grab a bite yourself?"

"Me? Uh, because – because – she's – she's my half-sister, darn it! That's why dad moved down here – family reunion, you know?"

Chuck snickered. "Half-sister? Mean she looks like you??"

Barry cackled aloud. "Ha! No way! She's totally nothing like me, dude! Like, she got the good genes! I mean it! Awesome face, gorgeous bod, great long legs – you'll swear heaven's lost an angel!"

Chuck skeptically mulled. "Well...I'll check her out the day before the prom first."

"Day??" Barry blurted then anxiously chuckled. "I – you can't! I mean she can't show up till maybe an hour before the prom!"

"Just an hour??"

"Er, yea – because she's – she's like real real busy, you know? Girl Scout meetings and piano lessons and church choir and garden clubs and babysitting and shit so she'll just be squeezing the prom in – but I'm pretty sure her schedule's all clear after that!"

"Well..."

"–But remember, the deal's all sealed and done when you turn Yolanda over to me! No refunds! Like, I can lead a palomino to water but I can't make her sip, you know?"

"Hey, since when's a chick ever gone thirsty meeting me, dude?" Chuck chortled like he hit a jackpot. "So, what's this fantasy fox's name, huh?"

"Name?"

"She too beautiful to have one?"

"Er, no! I mean it's – it's – er, I'll just leave it a surprise."

"Surprise, huh? Ain't one to me! Man, sure hope you love mowing lawns and taking out garbage and cleaning garages in hot weather – and my room and dishes too! Sure, I'll give my word – sucker!"

Chuck threw out his hand and Barry took it, his smug grin soberly dimming as their firm handshake rushed him ghostly echoes of an alley's brief swarmy sigh.

- – -

Walking Yolanda home later, Barry glumly pondered his deflated interest of Yolanda carrying her textbooks hugged against her bosom; 'Man! There was a time when you were jealous as hell of those books! But now...'

"Barry –" Yolanda brought up again, "You didn't have to cut algebra just to walk me home!"

"Aw, I'm doing alright in that class, I can afford a break."

"Some look real down somehow," she noticed and he admitted a sigh.

"Yea...I was supposed to meet a bunch of – guys this morning. Kinda like a reunion..."

"Well, since you're already cutting class, go catch them!"

He shook his head. "I rather be with you. They – remind me too much."

"Remind?"

Barry demurred and faced her with an affirmation of pride touched with selfish relief. "Man, Yolanda! I'm so friggin' lucky to have you I can't believe it!"

Her coffee eyes jumped with mock shock. "Barry!"

He blushed, "Oh –" he sheepishly I didn't mean it that way. I meant – know you...you know?"

"Even if you did, it felt – nice," she said.

"Oh...er, I mean, the way we're like from different planets, you jump ponies over hedges and I swing bats and tackle guys who spike me in the teeth. Your dad's got a big boat and mine's got dinosaur bones. I mean, we're different, but we still get along, you know?"

"Well, where's this leading us? she chaffed, cocking her head questioningly. He paused, picking his words.

"See...hanging with you helps me to – to –"

"To?..."

"Remind myself that I'm a dude – a lucky dude."

Yolanda's momentary disappointment turned quizzical; "I don't understand."

"Uh, yea, it's a little complicated. Er, Yolands, can I ask a way-out question?"

He tittered. "Well, depends!"

"Well...see, being you've been raised so ladylike, even more than most girls."

"Thank you for the compliment!"

"Yea, well...suppose – suppose you had to dump the way you are and stuff and had to act like tomboy – a real tough tomboy for the rest of your life?"

"Tomboy? Me?"

"Yea, I mean a real get-down and dirty gutter-mouthed tomboy. Do you think you can turn yourself like that?"

"Wow, what a question! Gee, I don't know whether I can shift that rad except at the point of a gun! I mean, the way I am is me. If I changed everything I wouldn't be the same person."

"Well, if you did, you think you can come back to the way you are now?"

"I wouldn't know. I mean, if I become as deep and dirty a tomboy as you say, I might be too crude and arrogant to want to be civilized again."

"Damn!"

"You roll me!"

"I know I sound confusing. Put it this way; remember that old movie the social studies teacher made us see last week? The Seven Days – something. You know, about the military taking over the country?"

"'Seven Days in May', sure. It was good."

"Well, remember that part when that clueless colonel guy's talking to his Army buddy about how weird his training was at some secret base? He said, 'it's weird guy; we're supposed to be training to protect cities from the Commies, but we're training more like they already grabbed them and we had to get them back!'"

Yolanda mulled. "I don't get it."

"I'm saying that...in a way, remembering you is like that secret base. Keeping me from being taken over – or maybe even after I am, though I hope not."

"The Commies are taking over you? Barry, you're not on something you'd like to talk about?"

Barry cackled. "What? Me! No, no nothing like that, I swear! I'm clean as a free candy store!"

"Well, you sure almost sound like there's some kind of monkey on your back."

"Yea, if only it was that ugly!"

- - -

"That's lower than the deepest coal mine and just as dirty!" Appalled Elmer Jennings chided Barry over a Chinese food dinner in his office. "I thought I raised you with better morals and sportsmanship than that!"

"Com'on dad, it's not like I'm stealing or murdering anyone!"

"Having Blueberry show up at Chuck's door an hour before the prom then disappear soon as he's off the phone telling you that Yolanda's your junior prom date? Can you spell l-o-w?"

"Dad, one minute looking at Blueberry will keep him wet and smiling all week! Look, the only reason I told you is you made me promise on mom's name that I'd tell you anytime I use the compact. Gee, don't make me wish I was a liar!"

"I'm only thinking of you, son – to keep you one! When are you going to fully understand that some of Blueberry's innate maturity and female sentiments rubs off you with every dip into that compact?"

Barry was about to retort but held back, his friends' remarks at iHop sobering him. "Well, that's why I first asked you whether there's anyway to put a countdown timer in it – like for three minutes!"

"To turn a peach back into a pumpkin in case your little hit and run gets too hot? I'm almost sorry I pushed you to confess!"

"Com'on dad! Prom's a couple months away! Besides, all's fair in love and war, right?"

"Don't make jokes that can seriously bite back, son. Blueberry meeting your best buddy face to face with that rapport you have with him turned upside down by her feminine perspective is just begging for trouble!"

"Com'on dad! It's not like I'll marry Chuck or anything! We're not THAT close!"

"Maybe not...but you might end up liking his new appreciation of you far more than you bargain for. Hell, I can barely face Blueberry myself without feeling – funny! And I know her truth!"

"Gee, dad. I didn't know you cared that deep!"

"See just how funny it is when I pack Blueberry off to a girls' school in the Alps because she doesn't want to be a boy again! Look, can't you do this tawdry soap opera by cell phone video?"

"Ain't the same, dad. That's like dancing over the web."

"Then drop it. For your own good and soul, son," Elmer ordered and pleaded, almost abashed in shaking his head. "Look, I love you like life itself, son...but I don't think my wits and willpower can handle your being Blueberry under this roof. Do the honorable thing for both of us and drop this, alright?"

"I – uh, sure dad," Barry tenuously mumbled, turning away for his room before pausing. "Dad...would I really be all that bad for a daughter?"

Elmer lowered his glasses and soberly sighed. "Son, to even pose that question!..."

- – -

Barry bolted erect panting in his bed in the deep dark, soggy beyond sweat as he shakily turned on the night light to calm and compose, nonplused and sheepish and thankful as hell that the insanely totally warped crazy dream was rapidly fading from recall, but he sensed enough to be once more chagrined and guilty and thoroughly freaked out.

If only if it'd been with Yolanda...

- – -

South Aries was a debris-cluttered slum even before the last earthquake reduced its old brick buildings even more into rubble, and on one shattered block slated for demolition the mayor had come with a stage and rostrum and press crew on a bulldozer-cleared area to declare his urban renewal project.

"...And from this rubble after Atlas trembled and shook the world, like a great phoenix, like a seed buried from a forest fire, like a cat falling ten floors to its four feet, this neighborhood will arise from the rubble like a phoenix!!..." and the mayor droned on to a nodding audience, Barry groaned, half wondering how much of it was campaigning three years early or just whitewashing his lechery scandal;

'He reminds me of the Wizard of Oz in the Wizard of Oz so much it's scary! But I gotta be here now and ever at these things because I'm the city's secret protector now. Man, things are sure different when you have the power to keep hell's lid on! I wish I could tell them – at least the major – that I'm no ghost; that Blueberry's for real and fighting spores so they won't plague here like in Tokyo City! But I just can't do it, facing lots of people smiling at me, gawking at me – a dude wearing chick's clothes in front of them – at least for the first few embarrassing minutes before Blue's girl-brain juices soften my mind, and be then it'd be a slippery slope I don't want to be part of if I know what's good for my guyhood!'

Buzz!!!!!

Barry jumped like a startled hawk, feeling the beltless compact in his jeans' back pocket buzz.

'Oh-Oh!'

A dark monster! But where??'

His white energy sensitized eyes scanned around and spotted a cop by the stage, surrounded by a dark glow.

'Shit! A dark monster cop! What's he up to?'

Barry was concerned but not alarmed. Though dark monsters popped up overnight like mushrooms, generally they were only as dangerous as the dark spore host's darker personalities made them, and after a brief possession spores left them like diarrhea either out of boredom or incompatibility or being blasted out by a good shot of white energy.

'I don't know if I buy all dad's spore research,' Barry reflected; 'He's sold on his idea that there's some great astral galactic interdimensional power struggle going on somewhere everywhere and that not only did Substance 99 – and the compacts it created – drop on our sidelines by fluke or accident, but so did the dark spores which he believes are really tiny matrixes of psychic energy that were designed to convert an enemy's entire Army to the other side, and that Kare was really their Johnny Appleseed gone rouge mad and AWOL over here, kinda like the Joker.'

'Talk about a totally crazy idea!'

'So then why do I get goosebumps wondering about it?'

Happily though, most dark monsters were relatively benign and continued their normal human lives unaffected, in fact often completely unaware of their dark spore infection. There was no hard and fast rule. Dark spores in themselves weren't all that smart; without Kare around to remote-control them, they were more like malicious viruses that relied on hosts who stumbled upon them for their intelligence and impulse for mischief – indeed,. The only exception was Creeper, who was really like a massive colony of mutated spores working as one organism, like a jellyfish, only badder.

'Luckily Creeper can't sense my white aura while I'm human and can also pick up his energy miles away', thanked Barry; 'If he ever did, dad and Yolanda are in real deep doo-doo when he starts tracking me down! And Chuck – well, who wants to kidnap him??''

Buzzz!!!!

"Wha –???"

Barry glanced all around the crowd and spotted the tell-tail dark aura emanating a construction guy in a hard hat, one of the urban renewal contractor guys on hand to observe the proceedings and start the real work.

'Two dark monsters in the same place?'

Normally that was unusual; you can work around all day without running into a second monster in a huge city, but then this event had quite a draw so such multiple encounters would be expected. Barry considered sneaking up and giving each monster a white energy bash to speed up the flushing out process with Blueberry's beltless compact, but that'd look too obvious and strange;

'Man, why'd the guys who created them build their matter transmuters to look just like sissy compacts?' he grumbled to himself, but then he also knew that its design was just incidental just like its 'P' emblem, kind of like the first Superman movie where Jor-El wore an "S" emblem on his chest, not because it stood for super anything like Earthlings would mistake it did with his son, but because that Kryptonian symbol was his family crest which just happened to resemble Earth's alphabet. Unless a spore monster was obviously a peril to society, Barry grudgingly preferred to let them run their course or else he wouldn't have time to even go to the bathroom.

Buzzz!!!!!

A cute reporter covering the event.

Buzz!! Buzz!!

A woman with a baby riding on a chest carrier.

'Man, what is this? A convention??' Barry thought with alarm; 'Damn! I better start cleaning house more if there're that many holes for spores to hide and trip up people!'

Buzzz!!!!

A clown selling balloons!

Seven, eight?

'All in one place?? They're just coming out of the woodwork! No, this is more than any coincidence mischief thing. Something's going on!'

Barry's white energy vision scanned for scattered dark-aura in the crowd wind and watched their infected hosts worm and elbow and jostle ever weave closer to the stage then, then right in the middle of the mayor pausing for a sip of water, the hard hat and hot dog vendor jumped on stage and kicked the other officials away while the others including the mother with baby karate-chopped the sunglassed security suits.

Barry's jaw dropped. 'What the–??'

The dark monsters all jumped up on stage and mobbed the mayor and a guy next to Barry groaned;

"Another pissed off block association!"

"So why aren't they hurtling insults and shouting him down and ranting 'no justice no peace'??" Barry asked until suddenly the mob fell to the floor except the clown who grabbed the major from behind and pulled him back down off the rear of the stage and disappeared. The crowd broke out into screams and turmoil.

'What's goin' on??"'

Some jumped onstage to hold the affected people while the rest of the crowd rushed around and behind the stage and Barry started to follow but a hasty cordon of policemen stopped him. From the baffled searching looks of those that managed to rush around the stage Barry could guess.

"What happened??" Barry shouted to one of them and received bewildered head shakes.

"The clown's back there but he's fainted or something!"

"The mayor?"

"No, the one with the balloons."

"Where's the guy giving the speech??"

"Him? Oh, he's gone!!"

"Gone?? Gone where??"

All Barry received were shrugs and he whirled to the stage where the woman with the baby and the businessman and hot dog vendor and others it looked like they had all fainted too and were being helped.

And their black aura was gone.

Simultaneously??

Barry hopped to spot over high heads for any more black auras in the crowd but spotted none. So they hadn't hijacked anyone else. 'So where'd the friggin' things go?? And the mayor too??'

Barry looked around beyond the bulldozed cleared area for the occasion and at the rubble of tumbled and collapsed buildings and shops and factories, shot through with gaping crevices and pits leading to greater cavities underground.

'Could only be one place...'

Barry glanced around and saw a coffee and hot dog van on the sidelines and ran behind it out of sight of the immediate crowd save a wino taking a swig, and whipped the violet compact out of his back pocket and for some vain reason paused, sensing his near eagerness to transform – and not just to fight;

'I wonder. If there weren't any spores or dark monsters, would I be so hot to hit this thing?' He pushed psychology to the back of his mind and raised the compact high overhead and drew a deep bracing breath, for a moment thinking how ironic it was that the best brain waves that triggered the compact's transmorphing circuit were akin those of karate experts crying out to summon their 'Ki'.

"Extreeeem Blueberreeee!!!" he cried skyward and suddenly savage forks of white lightning consumed him, racing bolts through his body's every cell and fiber, rushing him the jolting sensation of being a still pond where a meteor crashed and rippled tidal waves throughout his being, belching him to bellow like a deep blaring echo-chamber;

"I – GOT – THE POWERRRRRR!!!!!!!"

In those first moments the ethereal elements of Barry's mind were isolated in stasis while the compact took a subatomic snapshot of his present body for later reconstitution before disintegrating and reassembling it far beyond the physical composite of a dozen strikingly lovely girls. To the gape-mouthed wino in the rubble, Barry's henshin looked a lot like the one in Disney's "Cinderella" in berserk turbo mode with swirling energy rings and aurora enveloping his radically changing shape, though his unique specie of transformation wasn't prone to the break dancing reverse strip tease fits like the PPGZ were. When the fireworks faded and the compact released and interfaced Barry's mind to his new brain, along with an unconscious skill set of alien battle moves and tactics to wield new powers by in a body packed with alien organs, all wrapped up tight and curvy in generic beauty which could be twelve or twenty.

Pure Barry could sense in an instant in a dark room that he was suddenly very different all over and inside out beyond merely sensing breezy legs and arms or silky tresses hanging off each side of his head or the plump fullness on his chest. There was a definite kinesthetic difference, like the snuggling behind the wheel of two different sports cars, and though he believed he could drive Blueberry's body without being influenced by it, it was a hollow contention because his new very female body's neurons and hormones were a back seat driver subtly mellowing and tenderizing his feelings and thoughts with the flavor and color of femininity. Intellectually his masculine allegiance and pride staunchly fell back on sheer logic to make up for missing male hormones and instincts which fueled and propped his male ego, but he learned early on to his dismay that being male took more than just a state of mind.

'Well. back me again!' Blueberry sighed with a mix of grudging resignation and unadmitted delight, already sensing nuances in the world and herself through the sensory perception of a whole different body. It was hard to disparage his new form with its charms and powers, and in a renegade corner of his mind Barry felt he could live with hanging up malehood and being Blueberry forever, but his ego valiantly clung to his former existence by two hooks; one, the abhorrent notion of appealing to and ultimately being intimate with dudes – his previous sex! – which heavily tied into reason two;

'Yolanda...'

'I have to come back to Yolanda – as me.'

'Myself.'

'Barry Jennings.'

'Guy. Or will be again.'

'I will!'

Blueberry's mildly mounded bodice slightly swelled and fell with her sigh; 'Alright, I'm a chick again and my mind's being basted in girl juice, so let's get it on before I'm cooked – dude!'

With ballerina grace that Barry didn't sense, Blueberry floated off the ground high above the hastily chugging wino while the compact and alien organs in her body answered her will by mega-amplifying the earth's magnetic field with alternating repulsive polarity. Ignoring hundreds of gasping people who were hastily popping cameras up at her, Blueberry scanned the area behind the the stage and saw half-buried under rubble a gaping manhole in the shattered street and spiraled into it like a smart bomb down Saddam Hussein's chimney into a catacomb of basements and storm drains and store rooms and buried buildings, her new belt's compact suddenly a sun-bright flare lighting her way.

It always awed Blueberry how she automatically knew what tactics and strategy to bring to bear for any situation and that she also felt more mature than Barry's fourteen, which checked whose adolescent cockiness with a sobering keen of the capabilities and limits of her battle wiles and prowess. It made Blueberry feel slightly more detached and unique from her former self, ironically reinforced by Barry's ego denial of being a female even while being one.

'That's another one of this bod's traps for my manhood; making me feel so much more mature and confident of myself...'

'But is that really so bad??...'

'Hey! Concentrate, guy!'

Underground, it was like the earthquake left connecting chasms between the buried basements and old train tunnels and storage reservoirs and garages. She sniffed pockets of trapped gas and rotting food and chemicals. She felt tinges of apprehension keeping her on her toes and put the brakes on her macho Barry impulse to recklessly surge ahead. Though superhuman, she intuitively knew she wasn't immortal and the spores knew that too.

She perked from her hyper hearing;

A human heartbeat.

Kinda...

She cautiously flew ahead where the crevice opened out into a huge cavern-like space that used to be a multilevel underground parking garage. As she flew inside, a sudden rumble behind her made her whirl to see soil and debris tumbling down, sealing off her entrance.

'Nice welcome,' she quipped then heard a growl ahead and startled up to see the mayor – or what used to be the mayor, but was now a thirty foot giant with a hairy Frankenstein monster visage. Surrounded by a dense undulating black aura.

Blueberry gasped.

'Creeper!!'

"Surprised, little blue Amazon??" the Mayor-beast growled like a lion's roar deep a well. "I knew a high-profile victim would draw you out, but not this quickly! No matter. It worked, and welcome to your end!"

Blueberry was stunned; 'Omigosh! How can Creeper just appear without my detecting him miles away??' she cried to herself at this new wrinkle in a mortal enemy. 'He could sneak up on me anywhere anytime at this rate!'

"Since when you'd learn stealth, you refugee from a vacuum cleaner bag??" Blueberry haughtily snapped but wondered, just as she looked far too angelically delicate to be formidable, whether she really sounded tough as she was because though she talked like a macho jock her natural voice was almost Snow White dreamy soft and tender.

"You have your secrets and I have mine, you fluffy prissy cotton candy-tongued cream puff!"

See?

"I only regret it's the last tactic you'll ever enjoy. You were such a stimulating but meddlesome adversary, but once you're a blip in history, it shall be time for this city to know real terror! Terror and fear whose psychic energies I'll graze like a cow to activate my new minions!"

"That's gonna take a while since even you can't find all the spores Kare's left lying all over the place!"

"No small thanks to your interference, but I mean to resolve that shortly! Then once this city is in my grasp, its denizens will host new spores germinated by fear and terror, and they shall spread to sow other cities, other countries, corrupting your homes and schools and churches and capitals!"

"Er, think you're a little late. Besides, you forgot something."

"What?"

"My veto!"

"Don't insult me with your insignificance! You are just an annoying speed bump on my way to world domination, little pest."

"Your boss chilling out on the Milky Way express thought the same too."

"The master was too cocky. I shall not be so nonchalant – nor wine and dine my rivals! I intend to rid myself of a pretty irritation right off the bat today! Yes, this place is a fitting tomb for you."

"Same old song for the same tired dance, Creeper!" Blueberry snapped. "Try updating it – like to the fifties!"

"That sassy tongue! It should be yanked out by the roots along with a hard spanking but I don't deliver pleasure. so take your best shot, you measly little overweening ugly bitchette!"

"Ugly??!!" Blueberry's pricked vanity felt the hot urge to oblige but it was immediately dampened by softer feelings; 'Creeper knows I don't have it in me to punch the mayor or anyone or animal he possesses,' she ruefully thought; 'My Barry attitude wants to knock him out, but my soft warm fuzzy bod feels violence is primitive and totally uncalled for and to give peace a chance.'

"Creeper, that stinks! Hiding inside and exploiting a poor pompous old man and bending him to your slimy will like a pretzel! Where's your dignity and self-respect??"

"Fool! He's no lamb! He's a politician!"

"Humm. You gotta point," Blueberry mused just as Mayor-beast lifted a smashed car and paused short of tossing it, as though waiting for her to strike a defensive pose and she snickered. "Man, talk about a lame game! You might as well play dodge ball with the Flash!"

"All I need is one lucky shot, lil' Amazon!!" Mayor-beast leered like a dare and heaved and flung the car toward her – then suddenly caught it just before it was out of arm's reach.

"Huh??" Blueberry baffledly blurted; 'Now that made no sense!' "Hey, what happened, Creeper? Pulled a hamstring or something??"

"No, just minding my manners. Ladies die first!"

"So glad to meet a gentleman!" she cutely sniffed, noticing his vulnerable stance; 'Yea, and leaving yourself wide open for a good white zapping to kick you out of that carcass! In fact he's almost egging me on! But why would you do that??'

Warily taking stock of her surroundings, she saw no immediate danger. Just shattered walls and cars and debris in their little cavern, No signs of any real booby-traps or hiding dark spore minions;

'All clear! Guess the seedy guy's getting on! I mean no laser eye-beams, no finger lightning, no flame-thrower breath. I guess he's finally learned they don't do squat for me! Let's finish this and flush the mayor and grab a cold one, guy!'

Blueberry stretched out her slim manicured hands and cupped them and summoned in the lathe of her mind the shape of the apt white energy weapon that the compact would materialize for her, and momentarily just chanced to whiff the stale air –

'Okay, let's let 'em have it –!!!'

She abruptly gasped aback, flinging her hands apart milliseconds shy of generating shaped white force.

'Omigosh!!'

'I almost – almost –!'

Stale air –

Laced with gas.

From ruptured gas lines, sewer lines, gas storage tanks and Hades knew what else.

Any spark...

Like from a hurtling tangle of metal smashing rock –

Or a white energy burst.

'Didn't think! Nearly tricked the worst way!'

"Good try, Creeper!" Blueberry cried, "But a gas explosion wouldn't even curl my hair!"

"Then do it!" Mayor-beast snarled, hurtling the car and with a gasp of appall and bewilderment, Blueberry rushed to catch it like an oversized football which threw her back before she gently set it on the ground, but just as soon as she noticed the Mayor-beast was standing there in another sloppily defensive pose before tossing another car which she caught and noticed his scowl of disappointment.

'Geese! What's he doing?? He knows a gas explosion won't hurt me past a rattle and a cough, so why's he even trying? More, this is such a lame attack! He could've sparked off the gas way easier than –'

'Oh Frig!! That's why!!!'

Blueberry caught the last car and landed, realizing the ploy. "Friggin' weasel!!" she yelled, angry. "I ain't falling for that low down trick!"

"Trick??"

"You're obviously trying to get me to spark off all this gas in here when I miss a car or use my white energy to flush you out of the mayor – only you'll dump him at the last second and make him mortal again when the explosion happens, then I'll be in such a deep guilty funk about killing him that it'll haunt me and slow down my fighting reflexes and break my concentration so you'll have a better chance to find a kink in my armor, right??"

Mayor-beast scratched his chin and nodded. "No...but that's a great idea, you nitwit nymph!" he snickered, tossing another car for her to gingerly catch as set aside;

'Frig! Long as he inhabits the mayor in all this gas I'm stalemated! Unless I just punch the stuffings out of him! No! I'm a young lady now, not some adolescent caveman! As a female I'm supposed to be above primitive testosterone brute violence!'

The Mayor-beast bellowed. "Surrender that body to me and your leader lives, little girl!"

"Hey Creep, I've got enough possession issues already!"

"Enough pathetic jokes! I'll dash this car in five seconds unless you lower the aura around your mind!"

"Gee, and I thought you just wanted my bod!" Blueberry quipped, quietly removing her compact from its belt and mentally programmed it a command. "Look Creeper, you don't really want my mind. Believe me, it's nothing like the way I look like! Full of sleazy Playboys from under dad's pillow and gym locker dirt and you gotta sit in a tub when you read my dreams!"

"Won't matter once I shove it out! Once I inhabit that fabulous form and its unique powers, not even the other Powerpuff Z can stop me!"

"So, you know 'bout them too, huh? You just keep your friggin' paws off them!"

"Oh my! So motherly!"

"I'm not the 'mother' here, dirt bag! And for your 4-11, there's a no vacancy sign on my tiara!"

"Then I'll feast on your flesh and eat your brains!!"

"Well, bon appetite, creep–!"

"POWER UNDERHAND!!!"

Blueberry whirled and flung a fierce underhand pitch streaking the compact at the started creature, then only millimeters from contact it killed all inertia and stopped stone cold and flared a shield of white energy around the Mayor-beast's black aura – and trapping Creeper's own protective effect within him, beating by mere milliseconds the gas explosion it detonated which instantly kindled off other nearby gas pockets.

KKKKKAAAAAALLOOOOOMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!

The blast bounced shattered cars and concrete, and though greatly protected by her own limited white aura generated by alien electric-eel-like internal organs, the concussion smacked Blueberry into a pile of cars while it blew the cavern's roof of rubble and collapsed buildings off like a volcano's peak and sunlight flooded into the new crater.

"Clever, little bitchette, curse you!!!" scowled Mayor-beast, groping to its feet and snatching up the compact from the ground –

"AGGHHHH!!!" He howled and abruptly dropped it like a super-hot potato and snarling, turned to briskly scramble out of the crater. Blueberry soared forth and scooped her compact back into her belt and flew up to join Mayor-beast on the surface of a former earthquake shattered junkyard, just ducking a smashed car whistling past her head.

CRAAASHHH!!!!

'Whoa!! Just missed a Mohawk shave that time!' Blueberry sighed in relief just the the momentarily blocked sunlight around her impulsed her to dart away from another missile out of the sun. Snarling, Mayor-beast extended his fingers at her and bolts of lightning from them leapt at her, but she dodged and momentarily closed her feathery silver eyelashes tight to form in her mind the image of the weapon for the compact to forge from energy and extended her clasped hands and opened them clam-like to release a white glowing ball that turned into a disk-like shield before her which repelled the lightning then the ray-flames gushing from the Mayor-beast's eyes.

'Now that's more like it!' Blueberry smugly giggled behind her shield, then was puzzled as the Mayor-beast chuckled and yanked a squashed Caddy out of a mountain of junked cars and for a moment his black aura flared then infused into the suddenly darkly glowing wreck which he promptly flung at her like a whistling bullet. It was probably more split second intuition than quick reflexes that saved her as the glowing wreck crashed into her shield amid a wild frenzy of sparks – and kept on going, nearly brushing her gasping dash from behind her shattered protection, but it passed just close enough for a tiny arc of black energy to zap her shapely calf –

"OWWWWW!!!!!" she screamed from the searing lash, tumbling upon a mountain of scrap metal and glass as the car sailed past –

CRAAASHHH!!!!

ZZZZZZZZZZIIIIIITTTTTTTT!!!!! went the glowing wreck, melting amid mad sizzling arcing black sparks.

'SHIT!! I was almost TOAST!!' Blueberry cried, rubbing her stung reddened calf even though completely unscratched by the shredded razor-edged metal and glass she fell into.

The Mayor-beast even in disappointment grinned and nodded in admiration. "Such extreme reflexes! Yes, I must possess that body! I don't want to damage it too much! Surrender it now and make it easier on yourself! Drop your aura!!"

"Go 'F' yourself, Creeper!!" she loudly spat, scolding herself; 'Man! That hurt like shit!! Did Mom feel like that before –

'No! Not now! Not here! Concentrate on surviving, guy! I was too friggin' cozy-cocky! Forgot how white and black energy cancel another out! And his dark aura's even brighter up here now! Creeper must be tapping solar energy to boost his dark energy to turn objects into dark missiles to crack my white energy defenses and turn me into strawberry jam! Shit! If he ever learned the trick of pitching pure black energy I'd might as well hang up my – this sissy skirt!!'

Shooting skyward only moments before a ton of metal smashed where she sprawled, Blueberry dodged another dark missile and another, seeking any opening and moment to sneak a spore-flushing energy shot through, but the Mayor-beast's wreck tossing frenzy stymied her; 'Drat! I can't shine on him as long as he's lobbing cars because the moment I do the mayor will turn to normal right in the middle of heaving some car over his head!'

She somersaulted high over two spinning shrapnel spitting glowing SUVs.

CRRAAASSHHH!!! CRRAAASSSHHH!!!

ZZZZZIIIITTTTTT!!!!!! ZZZZZIIIITTTT!!!!!!

'Hey! Don't taze me, bro'! Sheesh!!' Blueberry swore, calling to appeal as Major-beast hefted a stack of mashed cars;

"Time out, Creeper! I mean, ain't no need to be so mean! Like, instead of wasting all your time and energy trying to whack me like Wile E. Coyote, you should chill out and do an interview, go on television, get millions of devoted sick fans and get loved and rich and buy the world instead of destroying it! I mean, who wants to be hated all their life??"

"You idiot ditz! I AM hate!!"

"Oh. right." 'So much for kum-bye-ya!' she rued, ducking a glowing car, the havoc attracting spectators from the nearby ceremony area. 'Shit! With all these flying cars someone's gonna get seriously whacked!' Blueberry realized, and moved her target away from the approaching audience.

Mayor-beast snarled. "Stand still, you overdeveloped hummingbird!"

"Na-Na Na-Na Na-Naaaa!!"

'Yea-Yea, it's sissy-silly, but I've got to throw off his concentration! Sooner or later it'll strike him to blackmail me by hurting the mayor himself and I'll be at his mercy! But how??'

Between dodging cars, Blueberry caught sight of spectators encroaching the battle zone. "Hey!!" she cried, "You all gotta death wish? Clear out! This ain't the WWF!"

'Man! After all this ruckus and destruction we're causing where's the heck is all the police? The National Guard? This ain't New Orleans!' Blueberry heard lewd chuckles and spotted groups of males gawking up under her and she angrily bridled even as she mindlessly pushed down her skirt; 'Shit! I'll be freaked!'

"Hey you drooling pimps! Find yourselves a cheerleader going upstairs!" she scolded, yet insanely, in the heat of battle she giggled; But then, it does feel kinda tickly-nice being all slobbered over so!...

A tumbling glowing car that almost sheared off her ducking head jarred her to her senses; 'Damn! Stupid girlie giddy feelings almost got me killed! Just because I like this giddy tingle from turning guys on!'

'On?...'

She blinked and looked at the Mayor-beast with a wild appalling notion;

'O Frigg! Could it work...?? I mean Creeper's real smart and has his own mind, but the freak's still made outta spores, right? And dark monsters mostly take after their host's bad side, right? Maybe if I...but shit! That's just too sissy fag!'

Ducking another flying car persuaded her and swallowing her qualm and male ego, Blueberry grudgingly relaxed one of her body's less combative instincts and felt soapy feminine wiles seep into her male thoughts. Drawing a deep bosom-heaving breath, she gracefully struck a demure leggy pose toward him and battered her feathery eyelashes at him with a gleaming smile. Her abrupt vulnerable freeze in mid-air momentarily took Mayor-beast aback in bewilderment while holding a SUV above his head.

"Really, Mayor honey sweetie-kums!!..." Blueberry cooed with a come-hither pouty look, sultrily gazing him over her shoulder and blowing him a kiss. "Wouldn't you really rather do something else with soft and sweet lil' old me besides trying to bash my poor silly brains in, mmmm???..."

The Mayor-beast blinked, his baser instincts usurping a power-parasite's control as his jaw dropped with a dribble of drool, and to her fascination and muted disgust she saw his trouser's groin thump a budge like a hammer beating behind sheet metal. He dropped the car before him and ogled her like a panther anxious to pounce.

Blueberry smirked; 'Man! Whatta sick old lecher! But more than his zipper's wide open now–!!'

"NOVA PURGE!!"

Blueberry whipped front cupped hands which opened like a clam and sprang forth a glowing ball that flattened into a lens that blasted white energy at the Mayor-beast and a thick cloud of glowing spores burst from behind the now rapidly shrinking mayor and shot on and around into a wrecking ball tractor right behind her whose great iron arm, despite its hefty mass, suddenly swung swiftly as a baseball bat at her. Blueberry dodged its path light as a hummingbird – but in the same instant the corner of her feathery-lashed eye caught sight of a small face peeking out from behind a shattered brick wall where she was floating in front of just instants before –

Instantaneously and mindlessly, Blueberry flitted back in the path of the blurringly swift massive swinging arm.

Blueberry's knee-jerk maternal instinct was alien to Barry's male experience and for a moment his unconscious puzzlement distracted and derailed Blueberry's primal reflex to pluck the child clear from the line of –

KAAATHUNNNKKK!!!!!!

The iron arm smacked Blueberry's chest with a heavy thud knocking the wind out of her as she was hurtled high and far and crashed back down through several ruined brick buildings and spawled on a pile of rubble. Stunned, she groped up, feeling the heat of her compact by its generated force-field aura absorbing a blow that would've knocked down a building much less caved in her chest, despite its modest twin swells.

'Well, that's one advantage having boobs!' Blueberry wryly groaned, rubbing her chest and sensing black and blue marks staining her flawless creamy skin, regretting that by design a PPGZ's aura didn't entirely cancel out blows, but leaked just enough of an impact to make you take notice and prudent cautions. Painless total kinetic absorption would make one fatally cocky and reckless and heedless of the compact's threshold, like playfully passing a numb hand over a candle flame.

'Okay! Break over! Time for Round three!!!'

Blueberry shoved up into the sky and scanned the junkyard, spotting several kids who apparently were using the place for hide and seek and other games, but no trace of a Creeper's massive black aura could be seen. She smacked her fists together; 'Drat! Black bastard's blown the coop! Still, I defeated the tard ball! Thrashed him, stomped him and kicked his ass right over the rainbow!! Yea! Whoo!!!!!'

She gave herself a high-five and a mid-air spinning back flip, basking the smug warm giddy rush of victory. 'Yea, dude! I'm good!!! Okay, okay, so my bod's battle moves helped out some, but I'm driving! Yea, Creeper! I cracked your ass and I'm just a friggin' girl! Be glad I ain't the real me all powered up with real pecs instead of peaches, sucker! Yes!! When you're through licking your wounds let's do a slam-bang encore! Bring it ALL on, you big dirt bag! Yea!!!'

Blueberry spotted the now normal but disheveled mayor sprawled on the ground and swooped beside him as new tenderizing feelings shifted her from combat to maternal nursing mode that helped the dazed and scratched man to sit up. "Easy Mr. Mayor sir, easy," she gently said. "It's all clear."

"Voice of an angel??" he mumbled in a daze then gasped, his eyes widening at her face. "Face of an angel!"

Blueberry felt a warm rush of delicious flattery. "No, Mr. Mayor sir. Just – a friend."

"Friend?? Have I met you at a cocktail party yet??" the awed mayor asked with obvious swelling interest.

Abashed, Blueberry found herself tickled silly by her newly realized wow power; "I – I don't think so, Mr. Mayor, sir. Er, can you fix your zipper, please?" She shied while he did to scan the brief battleground and guiltily sighed. "Maybe it's time you ought to know about me since Creeper's taking his grudge out on the city now..."

"Splendid idea, my stunning little lady! Say we toast to that up in my office – Cabernet Sauvignon '56??"

Fascinated by the man's shamelessly twinkling eyes, Blueberry tittered. "Er...that anything like Dr. Pepper?"

A sound behind her made whirl to see a little girl, around eight or nine, walking up – the same face that peeked from behind the brick wall, and suddenly feeling crowded, Blueberry skittishly backed to fly off –

"HI!!" the starry-eyed girl gushed, "O Wow! Like, you're so – so – awesome!"

Blueberry's launch aborted under politeness and flattery. "Huh??"

"That thing whacked you and you're not even scratched!"

"Er, well, I'm just – lucky–"

"And like, how you able to fly??"

"Fly? Huh, that's a little complicated..."

"What was that dark stuff that flew out of that machine? It looked just like a big swarm of bees!"

"The tractor? You saw Creeper leave it? Where'd it go?"

The girl pointed at the far stage. "It split up a couple of times and flew way over there."

"You mean in the crowd?" Blueberry surveyed the far scattering participants and spotted several dozen dark auras each going their own way. Her fist smacked her palm;

'Damn! Creeper didn't just split but did it dozens of times so he wouldn't detect as a single mega life force to me anymore! So that's how he got to the mayor without my picking him up a mile away! He can separate his special spores to infect dozens of people into dark monsters that can combine back together back into him later! Damn, really sucks! That means I can't take any dark monsters for granted anymore! And I just can't go rounding up all those infected people because once their spores bail out they'll wonder why the heck I'm harassing them – and it's bad P.R. to look a bully! Shit! This game's rules shifts more than sand in the Sahara!'

The little girl picked up a scrap of paper and a pencil-thin sliver of charred wood. "Can I have your autograph, please?"

"Autograph? Mine??"

"Yea, because I wanna grow up just like you!"

"Oh??" Flattery tweaked Blueberry's nonplused heart and she grinned and scratched 'Blueberry' on the paper with the makeshift charcoal pencil. "Er, well, thanks, honey. Though you might need an operation first."

A man popped up, waving a pen and a ceremony flyer as an autograph sheet. "Hey sweetie, me too!"

'Ohhh! He called me sweetie!' Awesome! "Er, sure, sir!"

"Me too!!" a college jock called.

"Me three!!" a geezer with a cane hobbled up.

"Remember, I saw her first!" The mayor called.

Qualms of consternation raced the back of Barry's smothered male ego as more people cambered through the rubble toward Blueberry who happily obliged autograph, basking in newfound adoration; 'Man! This is so cool! I'm – I mean my Blueberry side's more tickled by all this attention then a feather duster under an armpit!'

"So what's your name, cutes?" the handsome hard hat with roving eyes asked.

"Er – Blueberry!" she shyly tittered with new delicious pride. "Yes! Blueberry!"

"Blueberry! Cute name! Matches you all over!"

Blueberry blushed like an orgasmic giggle. "Awww!!!..."

'So awesome! It's like I'm a rock star without the booze an' drugs! They love me so much like this – so why can't I?...'

Barry's swamped male-ego spasmed like a red flag; 'No!! Stop! This isn't really me eating all this fame! Basking all these feasting caressing eyes! But Ooooh! But check out this flashy dude smiling his ivory and gold at me –!'

'Stop it, guy! It's getting too much! I – I got to hold on to who I am! Really am! A guy! Even though – even though being Blueberry feels just as legit a life as that one! I mean I've fantastic powers, peerless beauty, instant popularity! What more can a guy want??'

Blueberry giggled at a guy ogling her from her futuristic ankle boots and up and down her sleek posing legs and it felt like caressing hands to her before Barry's floundering backseat male ego finally bridled enough;

'No!!'

'I'm not ready for guys or bras yet! Ever! I'm not! Fight it, guy! Fight! Think of your team! Your pecs! Think of – of –'

'Yolanda!'

'Yes!'

'I'm Yolanda's best deepest friend!

'No! Even more! Way more! 'Her boyfriend! Or will really be come high school! Point's that I'm her boyfriend – a boy! – and she's my girlfriend and no one's getting 'tween us! Nobody! Not even Blueberry's giggly flattery and cute sex-appeal! Now put the autograph books down and step away, guy! Do it while I'm on a roll! Now!!!'

'Break! Break!! BREAK OFF!!'

"Ex - Ex – Excuse me, pleeeeassee???..." Blueberry weakly told the gathering crowd as she haltingly, jerkily backed off, her dueling dual self-esteems battling for control of her body and destiny, but her concentration was broken off at the rumble of an approaching TV-news helicopter loaded with cameras and her puff-vision zoomed up close at its bubble cockpit to see an excited man peering back with binoculars. A man whose sight made her gasp and freeze silly.

Yolanda's dad!!!

Chagrin and alarm wresting her away from the spectators and from herself, Blueberry frantically streaked skyward like a violet-contrailed jet, leaving copter and scene far behind till she skimmed city rooftops where she dropped beside a water tank and shook with spasms of desperation, summoning all of her overshadowed male ego's willpower to defy and deny her beguiling present self. It was difficult. Blueberry's allegiance to malehood was more of a covenant with a past life than her physical reality which could do very very well in the world without clinging to the very irrelevant and crazy notion that she was once a boy.

'Look, I can't do this to dad, to Yolanda! I gotta change back!!' Blueberry pleaded to herself, 'I know, I know, it's so awesome being admired and praised and creamed over by fawning fans, and it's thrilling and breathless as shit having powers and kicking ass, but I gotta go back! I already got a life! I know, I know! I can have an awesome new life this way; be a kid supermodel, a movie star, live in a mansion with the hottest wheels around and zero school anymore, but let me live out my dull old guy life first, okay? Please! Look, I'll stay out longer next time and taste some more fame and fashion between battles, alright? I know it sucks, but let me be Barry just for a little while again, alright? I mean one day you're gonna get your way anyway, so why not cut a poor old sap some slack, huh? Okay? Okay??...'

A pause of indecision -

Which Barry's male ego anxiously and desperately pounced –

"AAAAYYYYY MMAAAA GUUUUYYYY!!!!"

The thunderless violet flash instantly consumed Blueberry as the mentally triggered and re-set compact reconstituted Barry's original atomic snapshot and panting, the boy slumped against the wall – after gasping and hopping while frantically clawing for the suddenly vice-like belt's release buckle. He wiped sweat off his forehead, panting.

''Man! O man! O man! O man!'

'That was like – like drowning!! I nearly went under – almost turned a new leaf and a half! How could I wanna stay a chick? – but then I'm not one now, when it felt so giddy and cozy and great being admired and thanked so! Way more than I ever was as me! Then – what's that saying about MY life? That it's just chopped liver compared her filet mignon?? Maybe that's trying to tell you something, guy? Like maybe move on Yolanda more serious – real serious to anchor me to my manhood? But I can't use her like that! Not only because we're underaged, but I know exactly how she'd feel if she knew a guy was using her so! Exactly how...'

'No! No I don't! I'm a guy! Shit! Dad's right! I'm playing with fire if I stay Blueberry past fighting monsters, and the worst sneaky part of it is that when I'm Blueberry I still feel I'm me, like right now, only I'm – different...'

- – -

"I hear you all had a lot of excitement at the slums," chaffed Yolanda that night on her porch. Barry chuckled.

"Er, yeah. A little."

"Daddy's crew's having a smorgasbord over there, collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses. He said everyone on his helicopter was awed stiff by what they saw, especially the men. Do you know what he means?"

"Er – nope."

"Didn't you see this violet girl at all? Everyone there says calls herself grape girl or something."

"Not 'grape'! Blueberry!" miffed Barry snorted. "Sheesh! Takes the media to screw up details!"

"So how close did you get to her?"

"Way closer than I ever want, babe."

"Really? You mean she's not as stunningly breathless as the people there said?"

"Not as beautiful as you, Yolanda."

She tittered aside; "You're just saying that."

"No. Cross my heart! I was thinking of you, babe. It pulled me through."

"Through? Through what?" she asked and he paused and looked at her and felt the twinge of a faint but awful feeling;

'Man, I love Yolanda like no tomorrow, I do! But somehow, it feels like – like the fire I had while moving on her, getting her.. it feels just a little bit dimmed, a little like as if...if she feels more like a friend-friend instead of a girlfriend...'

'Shit!!

'Maybe I should hang up Blue's skirt for good. At least I'll really always be normal with a pretty chick who likes me and beating chumps on the field and the gym on my terms and do it all under my own power, not some freaky belt. I mean who really needs mega-strength and super-vision and aura armor and can fly hyper-fast anywhere without a plane...

Barry mused then soberly shook his head and looked up at the stars; "Well...least till next time."

- – -

Skittishly, Blueberry tugged her mauve miniskirt's riding hem back down her sleek thighs while wiggling back against the end of the seat from grinning Chuck in the dim pizza parlor booth.

"Hey, why so shy, my awesomely beautiful buddy babe, huh??" Chuck suavely crooned, sliding up to corner her. "We both know you've had the hots for me since third grade when you tackled me at Pee Wee football, right? And now we can get even closer – way close – without even looking fairies!"

"But–" Blueberry meekly gasped, violet eyes widening even larger at a sly smile closing on her quivery breathless coral lips, "But – you're just – just my – best...best...friend!..."

'NO!!!!'

Barry bolted erect on his bed, damp as hell and panting and totally humiliated. "No way no how and not a chance!"

No chance??

"Aw Man! How do I friggin' take back that stupid bet??..."

- – -

END OF CHAPTER TWO?


	3. Chapter 3

Blueberry: Chapter 3

by Dee Eon

"Here they are!" Professor Utonium announced as he entered the plush lounge of Tokyo City International Science lab where Blossom turned down "Lucky Star" on the wide screen and the powered trio took the documents he handed out. "These papers your parents signed formally make you three 'specially selected' live-in students of our 'trial' science academy here!"

Buttercup clucked. "Great! My folks sure couldn't pass up free intuition clear to grad school!"

"Yea!" Blossom perked with relief. "Sure be glad to have to get away from my kid sister once a while! Like all month! My folks were starting to look at me cross-eyed when I kept telling them that I was just playing in the park up to ten p.m. when we were off fighting monsters!"

Bubbled quizzically blinked. "'Academy'? I thought you were trying to find a way for us to stay here away from home for days and weeks without our parents wondering where we are!"

"That's what it is, dummy! The 'academy' story's just a cover!" Buttercup snapped with a sigh. "Good thing you've those blondie looks to fall back on!"

"What do you mean?"

"Forget it, Madame Curie! Man! Now I can enjoy every sports channel twenty-four seven on eight different screens!"

"And all the candy and cakes in the world to chow down whenever we want -- even on the way to the bathroom late at night!" Blossom giddily clucked.

Bubbles nearly swooned at the thought. "So I can cruise the mall window shopping even on school days now, right? So cool!"

"Well, you're all going to be working off all those couch potato calories triple-time with the work this plan will give us!" the Professor admonished. "Since I've only glimpsed very little of her from the South American news flashes of this terrific junkyard battle outside Buenos Aries, there's nothing else you girls can tell me about this 'Blueberry' than she's quick as a hummingbird?"

Blossom shrugged. "Nope. Just that she's maybe a year older and overdeveloped."

Buttercup wryly added; "And a smart-lipped fairy princess!"

"And terribly gorgeous too!" Bubbles enviously rued, and the corner of Buttercup's eye caught Blossom looking dolefully down at her chest.

Professor nodded and began pacing. "Well, fortunately she seems exceptionally talented enough to handle this spore beast mutant over there. I'm worried about that different strain of spores over there getting here and mixing it up with what we've got."

"Like, don't we've got enough headaches with monsters?" Buttercup complained.

"As long as Blueberry keeps that spore beast mutant at bay over there, it gives you all time to round up as many dark monsters and maverick spores as possible so we'll have them in one place before we decide how to handle them."

Blossom wryly quipped; "Hope we got retirement options too, Professor!"

"So what have you discovered to call us over, Professor?" Buttercup asked and he grinned like he was glad she did and lead them to a lab workbench to a flask containing a few grain-sized black spores. Apprehensively, Bubbles gasped.

"No, they're dormant now, Bubbles. As they are all over -- except that area in Argentina you visited, ever since Kare's been gone. Before you three kicked him off to galactic realms unknown, I was quietly working on a way to cripple his influence over individual spores to collect into a swarm to do his bidding, and based on what you radioed back from Buenos Aries, I've determined that this 'Creeper' is a kind of autonomous collective entity."

Blossom said, "You mean a colony of tiny organism like a jellyfish?"

"Exactly, only far far complex and thus intelligent. So inversely, its individual spore components must also contain some rudimentary intelligence, and I've been trying to quantify it using stimuli-response heuristic methodology."

"Uh --" Bubbles asked, "What did you mean after 'thus intelligent'?"

Buttercup groaned and slapped one up-side Bubble's head. "Means he's trying to find out how smart spores are, soap brain!"

"So what you did you find out?" asked Blossom.

"I'm not certain, but I think spores are actually inorganic organisms."

"They're not really alive?"

"Not the way we think of it. They're more like super-complex viruses."

With a gasp Bubbles jumped back. "A virus!"

Butternut sighed. "He means they act like one, not are, bubble-brain!"

"How complex, Professor?" Blossom asked.

"Roughly, an individual spore exhibits the intelligence of a small brown ant or a moth, possessing just enough programmed instructions to join other spores, be electrostatically drawn to cling and infect a victim, and spy on local situations."

Buttercup snorted. "Doesn't sound like much!"

Blossom nodded. "Maybe, but several dozens of them infecting a person turns them into monsters."

"But we've seen millions of them in a swarm -- and there's lots more Kare left lying around all over!" Bubbles exclaimed with a shiver. "So it must be awesomely smart then, right?"

The Professor nodded. "Technically, there should be no limit, but I suspect there is."

Blossom mulled aloud; "Are you hinting that if there was no limit, even Kare would have his hands full controlling them?"

"Exactly, Blossom. It's analogous to us creating artificial intelligences with the potential to surpass us, so you'd think that even Kare built in fail-safe measures in the spores to prevent such. The answer then became obvious to me while researching how spores are able to turn ordinary people into monsters."

"How?" Bubbles asked while Blossom paced then whirled in revelation;

"If they're like -- viruses, which take over your cells, then -- they can take over your life force?"

The Professor beamed like he found a new protegee; "Excellent analogy, Blossom. The energy of a human brain powers the dark spore which manages to infect it."

"Ah! I see!" Buttercup clucked. "So Kare himself was his spores' power source! That's how he kept control of them, right?"

"Precisely, Buttercup. In fact, just the proximity of a human mind was enough to activate single spores by induction."

Blossom nodded. "So that's how spores can hibernate so long without us detecting them! They don't show up any energy readings!"

"And not just infect but also to move and spy on them before Kare summons them in as a swarm to interface with all their information through his black aura like a Firewire port. I was working on a way to block or jam that from ever happening."

Bubbles nodded. "You mean cut him off from his spores so they can't tell him anything?"

"Not just intelligence but power too, right?" Blossom surmised. "That would explain why there's no record of any dark spore mischief between the time the ChakiChaki Chicks canned him and we unwittingly released him a few years ago, even though there're lots of dormant spores scattered all over!"

Buttercup soberly shook her head. "Man, that makes Blueberry's 'Creeper' thing sound even worst than we thought because there's not even any Kare juicing it!"

"Correct, Buttercup," the Professor grimly said. "That's a mystery that must be solved with top priority. The fact that this 'Creeper' exists without Kare energizing or controlling it means it operates under completely different rules somehow, and if it ever somehow overwhelmed Blueberry from frustrating its expansion, it might reap enough spores over there to pose a global hazard even you three together can't tackle."

"You really think that can happen, Professor?" asked skittish Bubbles.

"Well, Blueberry herself told you that she'd been battling this 'Creeper' out of public view for a long time before it finally burst into public view in that junkyard battle, correct? It suggests to me that 'Creeper' is getting stronger and harder for her to contain now. That's why I'm calling Argentine museums to locate this curator you said Blueberry mentioned was her dad for assistance."

"And?" asked Blossom and the Professor sighed.

"The only the ones I've located either have sons, or daughters too young or too old to be Blueberry. It could be he's keeping her identity underwraps -- which I can't blame him given what this 'Creeper' might be capable of."

"Then any girl that glamourous isn't hanging around any musty old museum anyway!" Bubbles jealously commented.

"So what are you going to do, Professor?" asked Blossom.

"Well, for the sake of the world and security, I might have to fly to Buenos Aries myself and personally meet each curator and gain their confidence.

"Sure it's not also an excuse to take a nice peek of Blue too?" Buttercup coyly asked his blush.

- - - - - - - -

With a deep tingle of shameful titillation Yolanda counted Barry's chin-ups in the high school gym, each heave of his swelling corded arms and flex of his bunched thighs rushing her with an abashed thrill.

Strong squared chin propped atop the bar, Barry askanced the girls giggling back in the gym door's window and wished he could bask in the smug macho flattery of admiration and ogling, only that thrill was gradually being diluted by a dragon of a rival vanity lurking the back of his mind, and something even more dismaying and warped as he abashedly shied uneasy glimpses of his buffing reflection in the windows and shiny doors;

'Freak! Bad 'nuff seeing chicks doesn't knock my zipper like they used to, but I'm even pantin' off my own friggin' looks too! Shit! I must be turnin' sissy schizo on myself --!'

"Eighty three!" Yolanda called as his flustered final struggle to chin the bar wavered and he dropped to the floor, dripping with sweat. She tossed him a towel.

"No need to push so hard, Kar-el; Olympics try-outs are next year you know!" she chaffed and he lamely chuckled.

"Hey, I just might, Miss Marshmallow!"

"Marshmallow?" she snorted, punching his damp solid bicep and his 'ouch' was only half-feigned. "I can bench press a hundred ten pounds without breaking a sweat!"

"Hey, don't press too much! Don't want you ironing out 'em curves for summer, right?"

"Ah! Then suppose I decide on spending summer vacation in the mountains, uh?"

"Man, that'd be a horrible waste of skin! Wait -- there're mountain lakes to skinny dip in too, right?"

"Sure, if you're a polar bear -- but don't wish too hard, Romeo!" she chaffed his smirk then brought out from her knapsack her a tiny potted Bonsai.

"Awesome!" Barry chuckled, eying the tiny tree over. "Uh, gee. Just what I need. A tree in my pocket! Good thing I've no dog anymore! But it ain't my birthday yet!"

"Well, I am quarter-Japanese and it's customary in grandma's ancestral region to occasionally gift a – neighbor so! Just give it sun and a few teaspoons of water in the morning and it'll be perfectly happy for a thousand years!"

"Huh! Now you make me feel like a slacker, not getting any roses to you first!"

"Give me a rain check! Coming to the barbecue next weekend? Dad wants to really talk with you, you know!"

"Oh? About keeping you out past eight?"

"Wish! He says you're the only one he hasn't interviewed from that junkyard battle between that thing and grape girl."

"BLUEBERRY! Not 'grape'!" Barry blurted before her sly smile. "Jeese, Yo!"

"Like, I don't know why you take a joke about someone else so personally!"

"It's not – personal. I just – like to be correct and accurate, that's all. How'd you like people to start calling you –"

"I get it, I get it! Well, since this Blueberry impressed you so much, daddy wants you to brief him on everything you saw about her for his strange phenomena task force's report."

"Why? So that they could hunt her down and see what makes her tick? Aren't they more concerned about who was doing the real major damage in that junkyard?"

"Sure they are, but like they both just vanished into thin air, and daddy says all the films and pictures of her close-up came out blurry."

"Aren't they all?"

"He thinks it's because she shines some kind aura that flickers so funny that it scrambles light going through a lens or something."

"Not because I means to – I mean, but that's a cool trick!"

"Well, daddy's going to petition the government for a reward starting at a hundred thousand for any information of where Blueberry is."

"A hundred thousand? Shit, I ought turn myself in for that!"

"What?"

"I mean, that's a lotta mula just to learn about some – girl!"

"Are you kidding? A flying girl who can't be hurt by explosions or thrown junked cars and makes rays from her hands? Daddy says you can junk all the armed forces if you'd just a few soldiers with her kind of power!"

"Ha! That's why they'll never see 'em!"

"Uh?"

"I mean, they're not doing that to those – Powerchicks over in Japan, so why do it here."

"Daddy only wants to speak to her, not operate on her. What's the harm with that?"

"Well, maybe she doesn't do interviews. Maybe she's just a shy mild-mannered somebody who just wants to be left alone."

"Which leaves just witnesses for dad to interview, like you."

"Uh, I don't remember all that much about her."

"I find that very hard to believe. She seems to make one awesome impression on every males who sees her!"

"Yolanda, I swear on my mother, my eyes have never laid on this chick like other guys have."

"So you're not coming to the barbecue?"

"I'm coming but I'm not doing any interviews over nothing!"

"Well, I warn you, daddy always gets what he wants, especially from freeloaders!"

"Hope not. I mean, like dad like daughter, huh?" Barry chuckled back at her just as Chuck's own beefy bod strode in from doors that suddenly doubled with giggling girls peeking in.

"How's my prom princess doing?" Chuck lightly called, savoring Barry's smirk.

"Just watching my guy pumping off some Big Macs!" she parried, throwing a wink at Barry.

"Well, I can think of better ways of spending pre-homework after-school than sucking some cold bar!" Chuck quipped and Barry groaned like from hearing an uncalled-for crude remark.

"Now you two super jocks be nice or Cinderella's going to surprise both you clowns the worst way!" she chaffed and both guys groaned.

"Man, don't even joke that, Yo!" Chuck grumbled. "I already made space on my wall for our Homecoming Queens and Top Quarterback photos!"

"You're thrashing all 'em centerfolds? " Barry sourly quipped and as impishly fanning their rivalry, Yolanda tinker a laugh and gathered her sweater.

"Gee, I need an umbrella from all the testosterone raining in here! See ya!" she chirped and waved and they watched her cheerleader skirt flip and flounce as she skipped out the door.

"Man, it's hard just taking her for a friend anymore, ain't it?" Chuck quipped.

"If you still wanna feel that way's alright with me!" Barry retorted. What guy wouldn't?" he crisply replied.

"That's not what I was asking."

"Yolanda's special."

"Uh! She sure must be because a year ago you would've been all over her like C.S.I.! Like the way you hit all those easy eager Alpos back in eighth grade for practice. Shit, you made my wet dreams lame, stud!" 

Barry's retort withered once smug like pride spoiled by some weird almost shameful introspection; "Look, I'm not proud of the way we used plain chicks like that anymore. Like, I had a bad attitude treating girls like – like meat like that, you know? That's why Yolanda goes for me; she doesn't know how bad I was back then and what she does know makes her proud of the way I turned around like from AA. I mean, respecting chicks' a lot harder than hittin' on them, but it feels way better inside that they think you've got class."

"Yea, class treating them like your sister!" Chuck retorted, shaking his head. "Man, I don't get it, bro'. You've gone soft on your macho yet you been pumping pecs like nobody's business, like you took wrong turn from a dojo into a ballet studio!"

Barry chuckled and lightly arm punched his buddy. "I'm just pumpin' up natural hard to keep up with the fool dudes who are juicing up! Nothin' wrong with that, right?"

Chuck smirked. "Maybe...but somehow I got a funny feeling that you ain't been pumping hard for her -- or even yourself. Fact, if I didn't know better, it almost feels like you're doing it 'cause you're tryin' prove you're straighter than straight!"

Barry's humor dimmed and he sighed and sat on the bench and took a mullful pause. "Let me ask something – from a old movie I saw, okay? Suppose you could have all kinds of awesome power, I mean real super powers, but to have them, you gotta be a - gotta turn into a sis -- er, a wimp."

Chuck chuckled. "How can you be a wimp if you're super-powered? That's like saying Jaws is some lil' Nemo!"

"I'm just askin' what I saw, okay?"

"Alright, alright. Hmmm. Well, if you got super-powers, maybe you can kinda train yourself out of being a wimp."

"Forget it. You're gi – a wimp to the core because that's part of the deal. I mean, your mind's still the same, but your brain an' bod's wimpy as they come, and your mind's being forced to changed to be the same way."

"Hmmm. Well, I guess as long as you don't start hittin' on guys, I guess I could live with that kinda swap for a lil' while I guess."

"But – suppose it doesn't all go away when you trans – er, turn back to normal? Suppose some of that way lingers afterward?"

"You mean slowly turning you into a sissy piece by piece even after you're normal? Shit, what kinda deal's that?"

"Huh -- just asking. So you wouldn't even start, huh?"

"Well, maybe I might take a few sips of super juice to check it out – but the moment I catch myself staring at a guy's butt I'm dumping it and going cold turkey!"

"You'd quit, huh?"

"In a heartbeat! Shit, what good's having super powers if you're gonna lose your balls and jock appeal to all the chicks in your normal life? Say, what movie is this?"

"Huh, I – have to ask my dad. Was his video."

"Yea, well, I gotta question about this junior prom knockout you were setting me up with."

"What about it?"

"Well, I been thinking I ought get a preview."

Barry jumped up. "Shit! Breakin' your word? You friggin' promised!"

"I ain't breaking anything! I'm just asking for a peep favor! I mean if anything, I have to worry 'bout YOU keeping your word, doing ALL my chores for a whole friggin' year when you can't up up with this ultra babe!"

"I – she'll be there, I told you!"

"Yea, well how 'bout just a preview peek at her? Not meeting her or anything, but just a peek of her down the block!"

"No deal! You'll see – her on prom day!"

"What's wrong with letting me peek her three months ahead of time? Or maybe you're trying to hire a model from some studio to fill your bet! Look, guy, suppose you let me get a peek this week and even if it's all bullshit I'll drop the bet, how's that?"

"I told you, she'll be there to do the prom. Keep your jockstrap on, huh?"

Chuck snickered. "You know, I'm arranging to clean out Mr. Johnson's garage and Mr. Hamilton's attic and old lady Crabtree's basement for summer you know – and no matter what tips or bucks they offer you, it all goes in my wallet to the penny, right?"

His stunned heart sinking, Barry blinked aback in dismay. "Shit! Kiddin'! Sure you really wanna ruin your whole summer vacation like that, tryin' to owe up your word when you lose? You won't even have time to go to the bathroom!"

"Hell, it's a dumb deal since you can't come up with Miss Wonderland!"

"Fuck Chuck, that's insane! You're -- You're gonna ruin both our vacations stacking up that much work!"

"Why both?" asked Chuck and Barry suddenly felt a pang of misgivings and guilt.

"Because – the last thing I need is you pissed at me for sweating out a lost bet all alone!"

"Oh, so your guilt trip's gonna help me out working off your bet, huh? Hey, don't cry for me, Argentina! Or you already thinking of worming out of it already?"

Somberly, Barry mulled, guilt buffeted by misgivings. "Look ...suppose you got a peek of her in – in the mall or something? Can't talk to her, even saw her face to face, just see her."

"Shit, that could be any hot chick you're pointing out!"

"It'll be the one you see prom night."

"Huh. Maybe I can see her a lot closer first."

"Closer? What do you mean?"

"Well, she won't know me yet, so I'll just walk by her or something to check out her face."

Despite himself Barry's heart thumped and he blushed crazy with dismay;

Freak!

My heart's beating faster!

Stop the shit! Stop!

This is bull-crap! Just imagining how Blue'll feel at seeing his face up close! These ain't my feelings!

Not!

"Face?" Barry blurted out of dismay, "No -- no, you can't do that!"

"Why not? She won't know me till the prom. Probably won't even remember me!"

"I mean -- she's -- she's got a -- a photographic memory. If she -- remembers seeing you checking her out now, she'll think you've been stalking her on the sly!"

"Aw, I'll take that chance."

"Wait--" Barry desperately gambled, "You don't understand, she's -- she's already being stalked. Yea!"

"What?"

"Uh, er see, she's –- she's got a real jealous boyfriend who's always watching her, spying on her, and if he caught you with her he'll turn you into potato chips."

"Yea? Like to see him try! So what you doing? Pushing some one else's chick on me?"

"Er, no – no, she – really doesn't like the guy, but she'll go wet over someone else who really cares."

"Huh. Depends on the looker she is. Alright, I can do this mall thing."

"And if you do you'll drop all this heavy summer loading, right? Look, I'm thinking of you, not me. Don't say I asked you to make it easier on yourself!"

Chuck sighed and nodded. "Sounds to me like you wanna lighten the load on yourself, guy!"

"Hey, if you wanna pile the punishment on yourself go right ahead, dude! I'm just telling you that I won't care because I'll win this bet!"

For a moment Chuck looked doubtful, even apprehensive them grinned. "Alright, I gave you a chance, dude. If the looker I see at the mall isn't the same one on prom night, you're gonna be so piled on with summer chores that you're gonna be a hunchback by Labor Day!"

Barry sighed, feeling at once sheepish and a little damnably wistful.

- - - - 

"Keep your eyes shut!" Elmer snapped, hastily throwing a brown paper bag over fluffy silvery-white tresses as Blueberry re-entered his office after the rainbow fireworks storm of transformation flashed from outside the museum's rear alley door. Elmer had discretely turned his back to the light show to avoid the dazzle of the elemental event in more ways than one, but then his shut eyes also missed out noticing that the rays which briefly bathed the office also irradiated Yolanda's tiny bonsai tree on Elmer's desk, and from its stirring little foil-wrapped pot some grains of soil seeped up and froze still...

"Dad, this is crazy! Feels like it's friggin' Halloween!" complained a soft sugar-sweet Disney Cinderella/Snow White voice trying to sound tomboyishly macho while muffled in the bag while Elmer guided the curvy leggy teen to sit down before a darkened computer monitor.

"Besides for experiment's sake, that's also protection for you and me, son." Elmer said not a little sheepishly awkward saying so, still not entirely unaffected as a man because even in her short and skimpy violet Powerpuff outfit, Blueberry's blossoming teen svelte curves and long sleek legs and nicely rounded knees were objects of stiffening perfection.

Squinting aside, Elder shook his head; 'Stop gawking, man! This is your son! My SON!" he scolded himself; "Damn! Why couldn't it been a football team he was protecting that night instead of a dozen and a half Junior Miss winners? Break off the ogling and get to work!'

"Alright, drop your aura!" Elmer said and watched the teen's bosom swelling with a mount of psychic concentration to lift her body's energy field film to allow her raw skin itself to actually be physically touched.

"Man, I almost feel – naked doing that!" the teen maiden muttered uncomfortably, almost skittishly.

"It's your new defense instincts making you feel uneasy, like coaxing a turtle out of its shell or a porcupine to shed its spines."

"Yea, perfect time for Creeper to whack me!"

"This won't take long – in fact better not!" Elmer said while hastily finger-punching holes on top of the bag to paste electrodes on portions of Blueberry's peaches and cream brow and a scalp of rooted angel-hair. "Besides, you already sensed out any spore monsters in the neighborhood, right? Find any?"

"No...but I still get nervous anyway as long there're spores lying all around the place."

"Spores themselves pose no hazard until they've collected in a host. Outside that they're singularly no smarter than a flea."

"Uh. don't remember that flea circus at the carnival, don't you?" Blueberry sourly quipped. 

"Don't worry. I keep a very clean museum – unlike some bedrooms! Alright, keep your arms raised and your legs wide apart, son," he ordered, feeling funny saying that to a girl. "Eyes still shut?"

"Yea, from feeling embarrassed!" Blueberry's fairy-princess voice quipped in the bag before wearily sighing. "How's all this shit gonna help you figure out how to make me transform into a power dude instead of a friggin' power puff?"

Elmer winced; it was hard enough calling beauty 'son', but also so dismayingly incongruous to hear such a soft sweet voice speak so boys' locker room crudely; "Once I learn why white energy chose collective pulchritude as the key quality to transmute you by I'll have half the answer, but right now concentrate, Barry! The clock's running!" he admonished, checking the monitor's time lapse counter and at three minutes asked the violet nymph. "Feeling anything?"

"Just stupid. Can I let my arms down?"

"Huh? You shouldn't ever be tired at something simple as that. Not with your white aura carrying the load."

"I am tired – of feeling like a jerk!"

"You're proving a point that could save your manly soul, son. Minimum self-contact, minimal tactile stimulation, minimal male ego erosion."

"How about minimal experiment?"

"What we're learning right now is a way to dramatically extend your tour in that body with minimal effect on your male ego, son. As Creeper gets more devious and powerful your clashes are going to last far longer than your male ego can endure unwarped in that body's brain."

"Great. I have to carry a paper bag behind my compact!"

"The bag's for test phase two, Barry. Ready?"

"Not really."

"Alright! One...two...three –!"

Avoiding the electrode leads, Elmer cut the paper bag off Blueberry's head which fell away amid a burst of freed silvery tresses while turning away to concentrate on his computer monitor – and for another more uncomfortable reason. Blueberry's violet eyes were huge and pellucidly bewitching as they focused on the monitor's flashing scenes of football games and oceans and cityscapes, of giggling baby faces and mass murders and of gardens and battle fields and friends and enemies.

Blueberry softly grunted, sounding exceptionally tawdry for her looks. "Seen better videos on You Tube's crap list, Dad."

Elmer shook his head, marveling. "It's fantastic! You're perceiving images over one hundred times faster than a normal person can scan them! I rather expected that - you'd have to have nerve responses that quick to keep up with flying and the hyper-amplified motion your aura gives you. Alright Barry, phase three coming up! Ready?"

"Been!"

The screen became a live mirror of Blueberry's face and she softly gasped and gulped aback.

"Aw, man! This is a friggin' flip-out!" her fairy princes voice muttered with lost wistfulness and dismay, as though Moses gawking upon the promised land he could never touch. Elmer felt pity on his transformed famished son in the garden of Tantalus.

"Talk to me, Barry!"

"Okay! Okay! Uh, okay, I – I just got over that shocked feeling of not seeing my real face and not being a guy anymore and now starting to feel like – like I just bumped into Miss Me Dreamboat."

"Good, we just established an initial effect threshold. Just keep looking on, Barry! Twenty seconds..."

Uneasily feeling tickled in places, Blueberry started to twitch a little. "At this point I usually turn away from reflections, dad," Blueberry said a little uneasily.

"Stay with it, son. Thirty seconds!"

Blueberry started cutely squirming. "Dad, it's good thing I'm not a guy now. I'd be changing my shorts!"

"Hang in there, Barry! Forty seconds!"

Blueberry gnashed her cute lower coral lip and forced herself to stare back at herself as a smarmy feeling rushed and swirled inside her.

"Dad..." Blueberry fidgeted with great embarrassment tinged with a growing soft pant. "I'm – really feeling real funny now..."

"I know what you're feeling, just ignore it son. Fifty seconds!"

Blueberry was softly groaning now, held rapt by her reflection, and by the monitor Elmer saw her frown wrinkles melt smooth from her lovely face as it turned blank and her violet eyes settled into a steady gaze of awe.

"Damn!" Elmer muttered, flicking off the monitor's image and moving up before spellbound beauty;

"Barry? Barry? Barry wake up!" He hastily snapped his fingers then slapped her velvety cheeks – almost feeling brutish ashamed for doing it – and Blueberry's feathery silver eyelashes fluttered awake from violet orbs that looked dazed and sheepish. Elmer sighed in relief that sucked aback before the stunning beauty before him. It was unreal. Elmer felt tinges of the same way meeting some film stars touring the city, but this impact was magnified. He wrung his eyes aside.

"Barry! Change! Transform! Now!"

"Huhh?"

"You're still sinking in the memory of the feedback! Barry, transform! Will yourself back into Barry! Hurry!"

"Barry?" Blueberry half-whined as though groggily being awaken from a persistent trance. "I'm – not...not..."

"What's your name?" Elmer ordered, even in high concern still the scientist squeezing every bit of data from peril like a test pilot. "What's your name?"

She winked up at him back like he was drunk. "My name? It's – It's Blueberry..."

"You're not totally sure, right?"

"Sure? Of – Of course, father! I'm –"

"No!" Elmer grabbed a photograph of Barry and Yolanda together at a carnival and shoved it in Blueberry's face. "Yolanda! Remember Yolanda? Your girlfriend? Turn back for Yolanda, Barry!" Elmer scolded. "Be a boy for Yolanda! Hurry! Barry!"

"Yo – landa?" Blueberry quizzically echoed then frowned like a headache was containing an inner struggle. "Yes...Yo..."

"Barry! Transform!" Elmer scolded, seizing and shaking her soft slim shoulders up to her feet. "Transform for Yolanda! Now! Don't ask why – just do it! Transform Blueberry! I'm still your father and I'm telling you – I'm ordering you to be Barry – Now! Don't think – do it!"

Blueberry frowned, tugged by severe reluctance growing by the second and only grudgingly did she eye the female in the photo then closed her eyes as though another part of her inside was anxiously crouching to spring at an opened window of self-doubt –

"IIIIIIIMMMMMAAAAAAAA GGGGUUUUYYYYYYYY!" Blueberry cried out as violet lightning enveloped her and her blazing curvy body metamorphed into a husky boy's form in jeans who staggered back then plopped back on the chair, sweaty and winded as though from a race.

The bonsai tree trembled and a trace of black soil ducked back inside the pot's foil wrap.

"Shit!" Barry panted, wiping his brow, "Shit, dad! Why'd you let me get that close?"

"Sometimes you have to tickle the dragon's tail to shed a little flame, son. How you feeling?"

"Like – Like I lost Bowie all over again!" Barry sourly muttered and Elmer nodded, recalling Barry's beloved dog.

"That's the after-effect of shedding a competing ego, son."

"It's worst than that. It feels like – like I had a choice of being who I always want to be, and Blueberry's points are always way higher than mine and choosing to be me again feels like Superman making himself turn into a wimp forever!"

"She can't override your yearn for Yolanda yet."

"Yet's the operative term, dad! Just before I barely broke out of Blue, Yo starts feeling like a friggin' sister to me!"

"Mmm. Good thing her father doesn't know that," Elmer quipped, turning to the monitors recorded brainwave patterns and shaking his head. "Fantastic! Helen has nothing on Blueberry!"

"Helen?"

"Helen of Troy. Her face launched a thousand ships. In comparison, Blueberry's can launch both opposing fleets"

"Aw please –"

"No, son. I almost mean that literally. See, there's a period immediately after transformation here where your male ego is still unaffected by Blueberry's looks or body effects, then about after twenty seconds that immunity fades away because there's no male brain reinforcing your mind anymore. Your male mind's literally unplugged from the fuel of its male instincts and emotions. Then after forty seconds this libidic response curve climbs to a conscious threshold where your male ego's now fully vulnerable to attack with no neurological seat to shore it up."

"Attack?"

"From the Narcissus Effect."

"'Narcissus Effect?' You mean nacro drug shit?" 

"The effect's far stronger than any drug, if it confirms my suspicions why you shouldn't stare at Blueberry's reflection long. See, from everything I've gathered, Blueberry's appearance more than just over-stimulates the male hypothalamus, but actually induces a limbic feedback loop–"

"In high school bio terms, dad?"

"Put it this way; our concept of beauty is composed of assorted physical aspects of one's body which stimulates the libido. These appealing aspects could be as subtle as the angle of the left eye to the size of the fold of an earlobe, each aspect being in a sense a facet of sex appeal those number varies among individuals and as dictated by culture as well, but these are elementary biological baselines here common to all. Now, let's say that to you, my apparent pultritrudal aspects -- my looks -- on a scale of one to ten rates a one–"

"You're being hyper-generous, dad. Er, sorry."

"Let's then say Yolanda's beauty rates a ten in my eyes because she has far more limbic titillation facets than my looks have, but she still only possesses a fraction of the total combinations of sensory titillation by appearance possible. Now, because Blueberry's beauty is a composite of over a dozen already stunning pageant winners, each themselves having separate winning beauty stimulation facets across the racial spectrum, her collective stimulation factor is well over a hundred-ten percent on the male psyche."

"You mean Blue corners the market in anything that turn a guy on?"

"In a matter of speaking."

"But how can that affect me if I'm Blueberry staring at a mirror? I mean, you keep saying her brain's one-hundred-ten percent female, so there's no guy meat in her skull to juice my guy mind like normal when I'm her, right?"

"True. Unfortunately the reinforcement source your male ego draws from is mostly biochemical, not psychological, so when you transform into Blueberry, the only trace left of your Barry self are your pure memories imprinted in her brain's virgin lobes. Now, there's a brief period of habitual persistence where your sense of self and ego can operate as usual, unplugged from any brain ground support, but once that wears off your mind's at the mercy of the effects and input of a whole different brain. I estimate that your male ego's general threshold for holding out against the Narcissus Effect without any break is around fifty seconds..." Elmer pointed at several oscilloscope wave patterns on a monitor. "See this line below the main wave? It's fascinating, because this faint second pattern is in a sense your parallel female self."

"What?"

"Yes. That's your subliminal twin sister echoing everything you think and do, only its entirely female. In a very real way, that's your new subconscious when you're Blueberry – and it doesn't like being shoved into the basement."

"Bitchin' bitch, huh?" Barry quipped to Elmer's smirk. "Shit, you mean I'm friggin' schizoid?"

"No, no, that's the wrong analogy. This line represents a phase of consciousness, not a duality. Put it this way; a car -- or motorcycle or plane has a cruise level that's its most efficient performance setting. This wave is where you're psychodynamically most compatible with Blueberry's body."

"Mmm. But to be that, I'd have to be totally girl inside and out, right?"

"Precisely. That line represents your point of no return in female gender identity because from the instant you transform into Blueberry, your female brain is trying to press these two waves together like a living mold, and the moment your top male wave here coalesces with this bottom one which means her brain's fully plugged your mind into female instincts and impulses, your sense of being female will be stronger than you feeling you're male now. It'll be as impossible to convince Blueberry to permanently return as you again as my convincing you to undergo a sex change operation right now."

"Gee, that's great news. Means I better not even think of going sissy, uh? What's this third real faint wave down here?"

"I'm not sure. It's more like some carrier wave than a active one. Humans don't have one, so for a better suspect I'm guessing that it represents the frequency which Blueberry dips into for battle instincts from some strategic knowledge bank of sorts. I nickname it the 'Amazon mode'. Such instant knowledge would be an idea method to train to imprint an army in no time at all."

"Huh. So you still think that me – er, Blueberry and the Tokyo chicks aren't the only Powerpuffs in the universe but became somebody's universal soldiers by fluke?"

"I'm almost certain you're all chance recipients of an alien hyper-technology intended for quasi-military purposes we can't begin to guess at. That Blueberry's brainwave spiked at the image of Kare means there's some commonality between him and Powerpuffs."

"You mean like maybe in another dimension Powerpuffs are supposed to be lawmen bringing outlaw Kare in or something but something screwed up when we -- our Substance 99 seeds crashed here on Earth or something?"

"Who knows. All I know is Powderpuffs do faintly resemble ancient paintings of Amazons and the goddesses Athena and Diana in their garb and who were no slouches in the warrior department, so maybe way back in time there were alien battles on earth involving Powerpuff-like warriors vs Kare-like villians. You've all it takes to be ideal goddesses, generating protective auras that not only shield you but mega-amplify your moves like an invisible super exo-skeleton and so on. Blueberry's also got incredibly keen senses; there's nothing in the animal kingdom that comes close to it. In fact she might even have more than the basic five to opt her battle survival. When I view video tapes of the Powerpuffs fighting, it almost suggests that they've a kind of battle pre-cognition that allows them to actually dodge laser beams and death rays before they're actually fired."

"You mean kinda like tell the future? Like I – she could tell if someone's gonna a sink a basket shot before it happens?"

"Keep your bills in your wallet, son, we're talking more about hunch sensitivity to imminent danger, not crystal balls," Elmer admonished. "Basically, all these new readings suggest that I might be able to at least use this info to create a kind of feminization proximity warning beeper in your compact to tell you when to break off from being Blueberry."

"Why not just a simple timer warner beeper you can whip up right away?"

"I was initially thinking of that, but it occurred to me that with your last battle with Creeper that he could simply outlast a preset time period and finish you off when Blueberry transforms back into you -- or rather, when you force yourself to change back from her."

"Yea, that'd suck, wouldn't it? Wait a minute dad! Blueberry can take Creeper on all day if I – she wanted to!" Barry retorted before his dad's meaning and concern sunk in. "Oh..."

Elmer grimly nodded. "Yes. I just want my son – you – to come home from a triumph, not as Blueberry. I don't need an instant daughter, especially an indiscriminate looker I'd rather face with a paper bag over her head."

Barry smirked. "So what'd all that testing tell you, huh?"

"That these brainwaves confirm my presumption that Blueberry's subconscious seduction of your male ego is accelerated not just by social contact and solitude but by unwitting self-stimulation as well, as simple as her rubbing her own hyper-sensitive skin."

"Saying my mind jacks off feeling myself – er, Blueberry up – accidentally?"

"In a sense, but you won't for long. So in the event you're Blueberry for a long period, assume an 'X' posture to minimize any self-stimulation by skin-to-to skin contact as often as you can."

"Maybe that'll pass making snow angels but it's gonna look queer on the streets!" 

"Just remember, your mind only exists as transient memory patterns in Blueberry's brain, and once they're impressed with its psycho-neural matrixes your entire self-awareness and perception becomes female."

Barry nodded. "I kinda know what you mean. I can't remember it all, but when I'm Blueberry I feel more – more soft an' tender-like. I don't like football all that much. Even Yolanda. she starts to feel more like a – kid sister instead of a girlfriend." Barry shook his head. "Man, that sucks!"

Elmer paused as though being gingerly tactful. "What sucks more is Blueberry's response to this three second clip in the variety video..."

Barry looked at the on-screen label of the video clip. "Chuck?"

"Blueberry's vanity wave register spiked like Everest at first glimpse."

"Com'on dad! I'm laser straight upstairs!"

"I know that son! This isn't really a sexual orientation indicator, but rather your – Blueberry's vain subconscious tickle at her power to titillate boys. Unfortunately, it's not entirely a feminine response."

"Shit, dad! Making me sound like a friggin' queer!"

"Well, it'd only be natural impish human curiosity for the male in you to see how well his girl guise can tickle another guy's strings even if for a few moments. You experienced that while Blueberry was signing autographs in the junkyard, remember?"

"Uhh...just -- getting my jollies off fooling dudes, that's all."

"At least it was the male you basking the thrill; the trick with teasing others with Blueberry's charm is not getting drunk by it."

"Don't worry, dad, I won't be tickling anyone's balls anytime soon!" Barry sourly quipped. 

"I'm just pointing out a very important finding here that can be very useful. When you're fighting as Blueberry, that subconscious wave is superseded by this third wave set which I'll call her "Amazon" mode. When you're fighting it's not by male aggression because that gender brain component is gone, but instead you're tapping Blueberry's own pre-programmed battle instincts."

"You mean that's how I -- she knows how to fly around and use her weapons and stuff like second nature, right?"

"Exactly. In a sense that 'Amazon mode' is your best friend because as long as it suspends Blueberry's other feminine influences on your mind, your male-ego is safe from being usurped."

"So you're saying as long as I'm busy fighting I won't be bothered about wanting to be Blueberry forever, right? But – what about that – that, er, little girlie trick I - er, she played on Mayor-beast?" Barry wondered with veiled abashment. "I mean, Blueberry didn't come packaged with a dirty mind to get an idea like that, right?"

"I didn't say your Blueberry subconsciousness and its feminine wiles couldn't be a sly ally – just don't let it behind the wheel, son. But remember, the instant your Amazon mode stops, the subconscious feminization clock starts running again – and it's cumulative."

"What do you mean?"

"Every time you become Blueberry, the subtly altered thoughts and attitudes you have while being her are carried over to you after transformation. Let me show you something..."

Elmer pressed two electrodes to Barry's temples then played a football clip previously shown Blueberry of two quarterbacks smashing into another then the monitor displayed the new brainwaves above Blueberry's readings. "Notice –when Blueberry saw this clip she winced," Elmer explained. "You'd expect that. Instinctively, as a female, Blueberry abhors violence. But look at the weak but similar set you just generated."

"Hey, I didn't flinch!"

"No, just a slight eye flutter – but it happened. And I vouch had I took a pre-Blueberry reading of you of the same clip, there wouldn't be any at all."

"Shit! Saying she's – she's tendering my brain?"

"I'm saying that she's having a mollifying affect on you which you can only counter by constantly reinforcing your male perspectives – without being arrogant about it of course."

"Great. Should I take my caveman club outta the closet and start dragging Yolanda by the hair?"

"No, it's not that pronounced yet. Actually, a little attitude mollifying might do most boys some good nowadays."

"Right, till I start flashing lipstick!"

"Just saying that if you're out on the football field and feel a new reluctance to get aggressive, get over it."

"Thanks for the sage advice, dad. Say, suppose I was stupid enough to keep staring at Blueberry's mug past fifty seconds?"

Elmer mulled. "Either one of two grim possibilities."

"Like?"

"One, the Narcissus Effect will totally sublimate and seduce your docified ego into a fully female persona, in which case for all psychological purposes, you'd be my new irreversible daughter."

"Or?"

"If your male ego's caught in ogling Blueberry's reflection, there might be a macabre struggle of resistance you might not snap out of."

"That bad huh? But how are you so sure?"

"Barry, you've heard impressionable tunes and songs that keep rolling around in your head, no matter how good or bad they are, right?"

"Sure. Like the Bee-Gees and Iced-Coffee and Ten On The Hood."

"Well, imagine a song so contagious that you can't get it out of your head because it contains ALL the ideal audio stimulative facets, thereby creating a kind of locked feedback loop that never ends, which so recycles in your consciousness that it could theoretically overwhelm and lock-up your brain into eternal rapture."

"Kiddin'!"

"Fortunately no one's in history's hit on that fatal combination of musical chords, though if they ever did they couldn't tell anyone."

"Why not? Huh, oh, I see. Shit! You mean staring back at Blueberry's face too long can turn me into a vegetable the same way? Great! It's bad enough I can't hang around too long in Blueberry's bod without its warping my mind its way, but I gotta watch out for her reflections too?"

"Well, there's a minor related danger here, wherein you don't achieve total feedback lock but partially so, as a kind of perpetual hypnotic trance wherein you'd -- Blueberry -- would be totally suggestible to any command by anyone."

"Great. Just be Blue's luck to run into a real perv when that happens!"

"Well, the fortunate thing about all this is you can train yourself to sense this limbic threshold coming and turn away in plenty of time. In fact, there's even a lemonade potential here."

"Lemonade now?"

"Of Blueberry using her – well, beauty as a passive weapon."

"Weapon? Kidding!"

"No, not at all. From your report of your last clash with Creeper in Mayor-beast form and how the Narcissus Effect works on you, the potential's there. By practicing the right pose and becoming visage to magnify and focus Blueberry's facial features for maximum pulchritudal effect, she might be able to over-stimulate a male adversary's libido by sheer looks alone, impacting his nervous system in turn and whereby stunning him. In fact, so long as they can see her facial features clearly enough there's no reason it can't work on throngs of males."

"Com'on! Stun a bunch of guys – just by looking at them the right cute way?"

"Possibly even more than that. There might even be a way for Blueberry to take advantage of that stunned state and issue an adversary a subliminal suggestion to lay down their arms for example. I guess you can call that pose her 'Helen Effect' because her beauty can literally overload and dazzle a man's libido to do her bidding. That should prove very helpful with dealing with Creeper's mortal minions without harming their hosts."

"You mean hypnotize people just by my – Blueberry looking at someone the right way?" Barry scoffed then wildly mulled. "Like, I – she could walk into McDonalds with a knockout smile and walk away with free eats?"

"That advantage never crossed my mind – till now," Elmer wryly said, then patted Barry's shoulder. "Take a shower and we'll go out for dinner. We had a very productive day."

"Out? Great! Er, can I call Yo in?"

"Sure. Why not. The more girls who bolster your ego the better."

"Er, I wasn't looking for any bolstering dad. Just a nice talk over dinner."

"And a cheap date, right?" Elmer shrewdly reposted and grinned at Barry's blush and walked with him out of the museum office and closed the door behind them.

In the dark the Bonsai 's soil shifted and stirred, its hidden spore, swollen with vital information it didn't understand but sensed its collective would, quietly waited for a chance to link up with others to make it happen.

––––––––––––––––––––-


	4. Chapter 4

**Blueberry 4**  
by Dee Eon  
dee (underscore) eon at mac dotted com

In the middle of high school class change's mad jostling hallway crush, something snared Barry Jennings' attention like a whiff of charred wood from a distant burning house.

'But that ain't no fire!' he thought in alarm, almost about to bolt with an anxiousness bordering eagerness before a tug on his arm curbed him.

"Barry, what's wrong??" chimed a soft but pert voice of Japanese-tinged Portuguese-accented Queens' English.

Biting his lower lip, Barry sheepishly turned to a quizzical Yolanda Jarvis. "Er, yea. Uh, I – I kinda forgot, Yolanda. I – I gotta ask Professor Hansel about my contested mark in my last exam, you know?"

"Didn't you do that last week??"

"Oh, uh, yea. I meant – I gotta see Mr. Howell 'bout – something, you know?"

"No, I don't!" Yolanda huffed with a smirk of exasperation, hugging text books against her turtleneck's bosom. "That's the sixth time you suddenly split on me – just like right in the middle of walking home last week and at the movies before that! If I didn't know better, I'd think you're sneaking off for a little two-timing!" she chaffed then frowned with dismay as her intuition spotted an odd guilt behind his lame grin. "Barry –??"

Barry vehemently shook his head. "No way, Yo! I swear, it's nothing like that!"

"But it IS a girl, isn't it??"

Shit! She could sense it's a girl-thing on my mind! I can't stack a lie on top of that! I gotta admit – something! "Uh, look, Yo, I – I gotta meet up with my – my cousin. Girl cousin. She's dropping by to – ask a family secret favor and I promised to see her, you know?"

Yolanda's pretty face wried with a wary smirk. "''Girl cousin'."

"Look, just look in my eyes and tell if I'm lying! It's not another chick! Least, not a girlfriend-type chick! Com'on, look! You're the only one for me!!"

Right. And this could cut both ways if I'm really too deep thinking about–

Yolanda critically gauged his face then gave a sighing shrug. "You needn't act so mysterious about it, Barry! What's her name?"

"Name?"

"Number 6, Seven of 9?"

"Oh, her name! Yea, er it's – it's – Berri. Like a – strawberry, you know?"

Yolanda gauged his face again and smirked. "Must be kissing cousins by the way you blush over her!"

"Uh? What? Kiddin'?? It's – not like that! I mean, sure, we're close – but she's just a cuz, but you're my one and only babe, right??"

Yolanda simpered, her thick high ponytail flagging with her shaking head. "So smooth, Houdini!"

"Com'on, Yolanda! I'm always up front with you!"

"Now that's a lie!" she chaffed, hard eyes challenging his lame poker face.

"Okay, okay. Yea, there's a couple of things I'm keeping a secret, sure. Just like you! Like anyone! I mean my mom was surprising dad all the time with things he never knew about her! You don't want me spilling all the beans about me so I end up looking a boring jerk afterwards, do you?"

"You mean even more??" she quipped, leisurely strolling on. "You know Barry, you have a lot to thank your dad for, more than you know!"

"What do you mean?" he asked her coy muteness and she shook her head.

"Your dad's led a lazy horse to water yet it's still drinking the well dry!"

"Uh, I'm not tri-lingual like you, babe."

"Well, muscles are a dime a dozen at a gym, is that clue enough?"

"Huh?? Oh. You mean how he's always on my case about studying over pumping up?"

"It's mostly because he's that way that I hang around you, and not just because of any giddy hormone rush!"

"Huh? Hey! That's harsh!!"

"No harsher than jocks being so indiscriminate about my grade point in hitting on me!"

"Hey!" but Barry gnashed his lip, her meaning sinking in that they both busted stereotype of dumb muscle hunks and bubbly knockout cheerleaders. "I get it. You're trying to say I'm lucky to have you because we got a lot of the same interests and likes, right?"

"'Have'?? You're still reaching for the bush, Gringo!" she quipped. "This sounds selfish, but you help keep me on my toes – academically speaking."

"Yea, it'd look bad if a dumb jock scored points over the class kitten, uh?"

"This kitten's still sipping saucers all around the block, big guy!"

"What's that mean? After all the movies and video arcades I treated you??"

"Like I need to beg for any of that?"

"Man, Yolanda, you almost sound like one haughty 'B'!"

"No, just being particular about who I'm investing feelings in – and it doesn't help when one's running off to see mysterious kissing cousins!" She exaggeratedly sighed. "Maybe it's a good thing the Homecoming Queen has first dance with the Star Quarterback or else I'd be dumped in the middle of my prom!"

A spear of appall ran through Barry. "Hey, that's cold! I'd never do any crap like that! You'll see! It's gonna be just our dance all night at the prom, you'll see!!" he asserted so staunchly that Yolanda spun before him in surprise.

"What are you going to do? Kidnap Chuck on prom night??" she chaffed and Barry felt a guilty rush slap his barely nonchalant demeanor.

"No! I mean, er I – I'm just – saying that – prom night's made for us, that's all, you know??" he asserted with mustered innocence, praying she didn't analyze his face before the change end bell clanged. "Uh, you better get going or you'll be late."

"Beats cutting class – again, right 'cuz'??" she rebuffed and gave him a pert wave and scurried off into the dissipating crowds, trailed by dozens of wistful male looks that snapped back at him with jealous scorn that Barry loathed now. Once it'd been smug fun being regarded as one of the 'beautiful people' at school, but his alter-ego's life-saving experiences shriveled that vain 'honor' into sheer insignificance.

'Man, she's gonna trip my secret one day, I can just feel it!' Barry ruefully mused. 'I might as well hang up my jockstrap if she ever found out I'm Blue on the sly. I mean, what kinda real man keeps jumping out around people in tights n' boobs, uh??" he pined just another psychic whiff tweaked him to hustle down the hall and up the rear stairs to the roof, grateful that the custodian was too still lazy to repair the steel mesh gate's broken lock which he once disabled with the merely twist of the wrist.

But not as me.

Barry came out on the hot shimmering rooftop under a bright broiling sun and briskly scanned for any other eyes then tracked his directional sensations eastward. 'It's coming from way over there, way past the harbor. Like some there's a dark monster convention somewhere, but it feels like it's not as strong anymore but getting dimmer. Shit! Usually that only happens after they've done some real bad screwing around somewhere. Maybe I'm already too late to stop it!'

'Damn! If only Yo hadn't stalled me like that!...'

Barry reached into his back pocket for a delicate 'P' embossed amethyst ring; 'Man, too bad it's way too pretty to wear all the time! Why couldn't it looked like a real guy's ring?? Well, at least it fits without Vasoline!'

A techie as well a jock, Barry sincerely marveled the little violet orb; 'So this cute lil' transmutator dohickey has everything it takes to change me and more in the same way that just one tiny chromosome of a sequoia tree can make a whole tree, uh? Awesome! Alien technology, dad says – and it matches because in a way after I use it I feel almost alien myself!'

He screwed the ring halfway down his thick middle finger and as he raised his hand high he stopped with a worrisome muse; 'Man, I know getting hyper-powers are a total turn-on, but ain't I just breathing a little to hard to jump into action right now, like there's even more to changing than that? Man, I'm starting to sound like dad worrying over my mental health, like one day I'll be dragging some guy home for dinner!!'

Barry chuckled too lamely at that then concentrated on the raised ring and like mustering breath and Ki for a massive karate chop, bellowed:

"EXTREMEEEEEM BLUEBEEERRYYY!!" he cried, his spiked brain waves synching and triggering the ring's nanotech computers and energy controllers and field density managers to tap and weave null-space energy into precise programmed patterns while by-product savage forks of white lightning consumed him, racing bolts through his every cell and fiber.

"I – GOT – THE POWERRRRRR!!" he roared like a blaring echo-chamber while wild fireworks of organized energy swirled around his mindless spasm's seeming disco dance as his clothes and body were atomically converted into a quasi-quantum being and violet Powerpuff outfit which whirled and boogied before the fireworks wafted and left in their wake a willowy figure in a Vegas-showgirl pose, flaunting fluffy cotton-candy poodle ears hanging off an eternally youthful face and curvaceous figure that could be twelve or twenty.

Lush feathery ivory eyeslashes knit tight, Blueberry drew a long delicious breath into her new lungs then fluttered open her huge pellucid violet eyes and held up her slim creamy pearly-nailed hands and the now fittingly delicate ring which she smiled at like it was a third violet eye looking back.

'So awesome! Can never get tired of this!' she thought aloud with a slight unbashedly girlish titter, already sensing the subtle changes of world and self perspectives by her female-wired brain. Unencumbered by Barry's macho self-esteem fixations and perfect body-image fetish and romantic concerns that were rooted the masculine instincts of a male brain that no longer existed, it was like a meaningless burden had lifted off her slim sturdy shoulders, only further separating the alligence Barry had with his former self and gender.

'Yea! Might be smaller than before but I'm no shrinking violet, world!' Blueberry clucked, patting the violet compact-like buckle of a belt that snugly wrapped her wasp-like waist. "Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed and ready to rock n' roll!" she cried and with more bravado than necessity her perfect knees bent to spring her into the skies. No longer a true corporeal being, with no more weight or mass than ball lightning, she moved free of gravity and inertia as the compact manipulated local energy fields like a ship's sails under the helm of her thoughts and whims.

'It's too liberating,' Blueberry reflected with Barry's lingering qualm. "To fly, to feel and have all this power, it's like a beautiful girl luring me beside her all by itself. It's almost like going back to being human is a long step down–! No – don't think like that! Keep your mind on the ball, guy! Amazon mode all the way!!"

She concentrated her mission and thoughts into a tight ball and launched herself eastward over Buenos Aries and toward the far Atlantic, luxuriating in the caressing windstream sweeping over her white energy aura and so tingling her creamy skin until interrupted only by her mindlessly stroking fingers.

ooOoo

"What is it, Peach??" Utonium cried, pulling on his houserobe in the dark lab while hurrying over with a pajamaed Ken to the massive computer monitor console. The digital dog barked at the luminous blip on the wire-framed projection of South America.

"Powerful white energy moving in the southern western hemisphere wan!"

"Blueberry," Utonium breathed aloud in awe. "Wonder what she's up to."

"As long as she seems to have nothing to do with us, I guess all we can do is watch and hope she wins against whatever's facing her," Ken said, marveling. "Look at that energy flux! Even twelve thousand miles away and her white energy trace signal's even stronger then the Puffs' here put together!"

"More than that. Somehow it looks familiar..." Utonium pondered, studying the readouts. "When DYNAMO went back to Edo times, its internal sensor scan readings registered the Ooedo Chakichaki Musume's white energy radiance as higher than our Puffs, in fact these Blueberry energy frequency signatures are remarkably similar."

"Are you hinting they share the same source?" Ken asked.

"Hmmm. Seems likely. We should recall that in a sense, our Puffs received their white energy second-hand as it were when we released the Kennainum He from inside the trunk buried in that iceberg. It would've been markedly weakened by its prolonged exposure with the dark light it was confining. However, Blueberry's white energy registration is nearly as pure as the Edo Puffs."

"I see. So the 'Kennainum He' Kennai Hiraga used in the trunk had to've come from an original pure source. But if that's true, how did Blueberry get exposed to the same stuff way over there and only a few years ago?"

"Hmmm. Wait! Remember the girls' report on Blueberry; that she was initially exposed to white energy from a flask struck by lightning in some Buenos Aries museum?"

"Yes! A flask her grandpa found in a bomb crater in Yokohoma wan!" piped Peach.

"And Kennai Hiraga mentions a flask among other equipment in his preparation of Kennainum He'. It ties in! These Chakichaki-Blueberry energy signatures are as distinct as fingerprints, even though I must profess, I doubt 'Kennainum He' itself was totally of Kennai Hiraga's creation."

"You mean Kennai Hiraga produced it from somewhere else?" Ken asked,

"It would seem so. You'd need nuclear reactors at the minimum to create such a molecular mass-energy transmutation catalyst as 'Kennainum He'. Something still well beyond our science today."

"Are you suggesting that 'Kennainum He' is really derived from an extraterrestrial substance?"

"Hmmm. Kennai Hiraga's notes mentioned finding a strange meteorite a few months before he created 'Kennainum He'. There might be a link. It's been a notion I've been reluctant to indulge because it opens up possibilities beyond our wildest imaginations, but yet, we must strongly consider that...and the ramifications."

ooOoo

"Could've sworn I whiffed something this way!..." Blueberry wearily thought under a broiling sun while soaring silently as a soap bubble below the drone of jetliners orbiting the far horizon's airport which forced her to fly only a few hundred feet above the baked shoreline. "At least dad will excuse me for cutting class this time, though my grades can afford it – I think!"

The lithe curvy violet Puff spotted on the beach farther north scores of flashing red lights, and puzzled she flew near to view dozens of police cars and ambulances servicing hundreds of people laid out on the beach, most not even in beach wear but in office and casual and work attire. Even several fully attired iron workers and cops.

'Geeze, talk about concert sunstroke! I know it's one hot day, but try stripping down before you hit the surf, dudes! Can't wait to see this on the news!'

Not wishing to distract the emergency workers, she soared further on along a rocky beach where people spotted and waved and cheered her out. She felt giggly tickles of titillation at the ogling and as usual slowed for her public even as she felt Barry's shy skittish strain against that impulse, much less to swoop down to sign autographs while basking her fans' gawks and envy. It was a precarious balance of balking male ego and giddy feminine vanity as part of her felt totally abashed as in drag before people and a contrary side that giggled in delight at others admiring her form. Especially the guys, and it was so cool to see their Speedo bikini briefs and swim trunks swell into tight tents below their sheep's eyes.

Like, guys are so stupid! They think it's so awesome feeling your jollies just in one place instead of all over yourself just like us!' Blueberry snickered before catching herself; "Huh? What do I mean, 'just like us'? I'm not that 'us'! I'm a guy-us!!"

Yet even as Blueberry reasserted her homeless gender-identity with a huskier huff, it felt lame under the suffocating fact of her physical fact. Though unabashedly strutting her comeliness before others were humiliations to her macho Barry feelings, in a bizarre way his own morbid curiosity to taste the forbidden fruit of seeing fellow dudes gawk his new form was unadmitted smug delight indulged under the table. It made Blueberry feel so deliciously naughty knowing she had her Barry feelings' grudging tolerance in flaunting her form so, and sometimes she regarded her clinging male attitudes and hang-ups as the tantrums of a timid kid brother.

As the tantrums of someone else.

Indeed it was all slowly ever getting a little more confusing to still think of herself as Barry but with strange and different female feelings greasing his macho denial of sissiness to dip his new form's subtle delights. Like the wind fluttering her short skirt as the racing slipstream stroked her soft blemishless skin from face to ankles, pumping up a heady tingling breathless crescendo trembling with glowing excitement that popped like a soft sweet explosion that left her trembling in a swimmy daze...

'Ooooooouuhhhhhhaaaaaaahhhhhhh...'

With a long sigh she fell several hundred feet like in an air pocket before her side-lined subconscious telepathically instructed her compact-like buckle to amplify her aura's oscillating magnetic field to balance off the earth's to stabilize her levitation.

'Ahhhhhh...so – awesome!!...' Blueberry panted, groggily emerging from the wake of an erotic eruption; "Gee...like maybe it wouldn't be all that tragic being stuck like this, as a chick, you know? Sure, I'd miss my muscles and guy games and all the cow-eyed chicks, but they already don't feel all that important to me like this. I mean, I'm my own ultimate dream-chick – and everyone elses' too, so how you go higher than that? And to tell you the truth – and I ain't gay or shit, but it's kinda cool and giggly when you see uber-studs droolin' back you – just like that!" she declared, her feather-lashed eye spotting some muscle-beach types looking up and waving back at her, as they always did on roof tops and in parks and back yards.

Blueberry liked that – a lot, and often floated down to give a neighborly 'Hello' and play coy and enthralled as the eager jocks put on a private exhibition of calisthenics and muscle-building poses before her flashing violet eyes and schoolgirl coos. That Blueberry shamelessly reaped such attention from men should've flapped a gender-identity red flag in Barry's soul, but ironically it was a sneaky seduction because his jock vanity often sized-up other buffed-up guys as inspiration and a competitive pump. So in Blueberry's brain that excuse easily slid into an appreciation far beyond his intent. Only when she sensed her well-rounded bosom thudding deeper and her breath becoming labored and shallow did it trigger Barry's ego's alarm and jerk his appall and chagrin away to swiftly sweep such lapses of manliness under the carpet-excuse of being a girl at the moment.

All this subliminal confusion only drew an impish smile to Blueberry's lips because it was like her Barry-self was a back seat driver in a dream and knew he was, and as such couldn't help letting his macho go slack off in the face of new and thrilling forbidden male-ego damning situations because there was no penalty or affect in the real world – supposedly. Of course, it didn't help that Barry's male ego was irrelevant within a sensual female bod which constantly teased his manhood's restraint from tasting femininity's most awesome temptations.

Waving back at the muscle-beach cowboys, a kindred notion twittered her mind;

'Chuck's a hunk just like them too! One day I should 'happen' to fly over his house and catch him exercising in the backyard or in his pool...'

Blueberry giggled; 'Chuck wants to take me to the prom so bad, what a sweet guy! So why should 'I' do a rotten thing like just showing up to fool him into dumping Yolanda for me then go AWOL on him when I'm way better than she is anyway! After all he's my best nicest friend so doesn't he deserve the ultimate prom night to remember? Like, Chuck's always such an awesome stand-up guy, and I'll finally have a chance to show him how much I really – appreciate him! I mean I've always envied the slick way he moves on all those giggly chicks, and now I'll get to see if it really works myself! Like, that'd be so cool!...'

She chidefully sighed at herself, violet eyes rolling; "That's why it'd be so wrong to trick such a nice guy hunk like him on prom night! I mean, stealing Yolanda as my prom date's not worth making him feel dumped on – and besides she only feels like a sister to me anyway while Chucky feels like – like my very best pal, and pals oughta be having fun together on a special night like that, right? Chucky also deserves the best looker on his arm, and who's better than me showing up and making him look uber-great in front the team and all the guys, uh?? Like, I can make their drooling jaws drop and their flies bust open just smiling, and Chucky would feel so so proud being with me! My best cutest buddy and me – together!"

Eeeeeekkkk!!

Blueberry squealed and hugged herself in several air-spirals. 'Yes! I've just got to make Chucky feel proud as a rooster about me – but like, I don't have a thing to wear but guy suits! Like, what's the coolest fanciest threads I love seeing chicks struttin' in? I gotta check that out – like something all pink and swishy and leggy and especially if it peeks some boobs like Chucky and I like! Heck, I haven't even seen mine yet, but if they're anything like the rest of me his eyes are just gonna pop! Tee-hee!! And if I'm really lucky he might even later ask me out to a ball game or a concert Dutch-free – and maybe even sneak us inside the college campus disco? O like that'd be so totally rad cooll! Hmmm. Might have to lay some hints on the numskull about that, but like it's a done deal by laying a smile on that doorman! O man, it's gonna be one awesome night, shooting the breeze and drinking and being all alone and cozy with Chucky and telling him how I feel about us that I couldn't before!...'

'Say, maybe I ought drop in on Chucky's place and give him a prom promise before I turn back into a dumb selfish dude who just wants to stab my handsome hunk in the back! Yes –!" She twirled about like a darting heart-thumping hummingbird, "I'll just go do that right –"

WHHHOOOSSSHHHH – !!

WA-KA-KA-KA-KA – BOOOOM!!

The sonic boom of something huge hurtling past behind her where she had been floating motionless only moments before hammered her senseless, smacking her like a swallow in a gale to wildly reel and crash into the ocean off the beach and pounding the sandy bottom. Dazed and wildly and frantically gathering her wits, Blueberry sprung off the shallow crater she created and burst from the surf like a Trident missile. Baffled, she whirled and spotted the fresh smashed wreck of a darkly glowing small freighter, and it was hot – and not only because of impact.

It'd been hurtled way way past merely supersonic, like meteor on entry. At her.

"Curse you! Just one second!!" roared a deep exasperated voice nearby and she whirled to see what appeared a huge featureless sumo wrestler composed of trillions of glowing vibrating black bees.

"Creeper!! You bastard!" Blueberry cried out in defiant indignation masking the fact she was trembling with horror and dismay just shy of wetting her leotards. The freighter was dense with intensely concentrated dark energy; Forget an impact – even just brushing the bow wave of such an immense black light infused object would've sufficiently stunned her long enough to make her concentration at maintaining her white aura to hiccup and allow the full kinetic force of a thousand-ton wreck through and splatter her into jelly at a moment when her max shield was lowered by 'preoccupation' on other matters...

'Man! If – If I hadn't thought of finding Chuck at just that very moment–!" She reflected with a shudder and an agnostic prayer of thanks yet with guilty self-admonishment also for letting her emotions distract her from the reins of her white aura shield. 'And I was asleep on the saddle this time!'

Man! Someone's gotta BE watching over me!!

"Your double whammy fudged out, Creeper!!" Blueberry haughtily cried back.

"Maybe – but for a few seconds we turned you into a trembling little girl!!" boasted the black mass, piquing the core of Barry's ego.

"Ain't no girl! And a sneak attack behind one's back's low as you can go – unless you got no 'rocks'!" Blueberry snapped back, concealing fresh new terrors.

Jeezus! How'd he get so friggin' strong to hurtle a whole freakin' wreck like that so fast it'd need a heat shield? Bad enough he freaking sneaked up on me like a stealth bomber! I won't have a chance in hell if he's able to do this all the time now!

"Lower your aura and we'll spare your life!" boomed Creeper.

"First you wanna smash me, now you wanna serve me! Make up your mind!"

"Either your body's ours or dust, Blueberry. Give it up and your soul can continue life condensed as part of our collective."

"You mean as another spore? Sounds a seedy deal to me, dude! I'll pass."

"Very well, you impudent imp, we hate to force the issue..."

Shrugging off her fresh heebie-geebies, Blueberry braced for an attack as Creeper held out his aims – and suddenly a flock of geese erupted off the rocky shoreline and flapped skyward.

Blueberry snickered. "Com'on! Is that the best encore you can do??"

"Lower your aura – now!"

"You're slipping, Creeper!" Blueberry scoffed, minding her back even as watched the flock rise and rise then arc east away from them. "Ha! They also got a great sense of direction!"

"They're headed the right way, you impudent imp. And you'll have no choice but surrender to us!"

"Crazy, Creeper! You better hit bed a lot earlier to dream up better decoys than that!!" she snorted, watching the flock fly higher and further, then a familiar faint roar once overlooked rang an alarm in her head and she gasped in dismay as a landing jet passed overhead.

'Wait!

Where they going??

The airport??

Where two planes were taking off and landing every minute over there.

Most with hungry air-breathing engines gulping unobstructed air during the most critical periods of flight...

Ice trickled down Blueberry's spine.

No!

Can't be!

He wouldn't!!

"Creeper cut the shit!!" Blueberry cried out and Creeper gruffawed.

"It's up to you, Blueberry!! Surrender to us!!"

Blueberry felt herself surge forward but as swiftly Creeper blocked her way. "Throwing that freighter was a good limbering up!" Creeper smugly clucked. "Think you can afford sparring with us right now, you ditzy doll??"

Blueberry tried to dart aside but Creeper blocked her way again. "Come my shrinking violet! As you say, 'let's dance!'"

Blueberry nervously nibbled her coral-glossed lower lip.

'Damn! I don't know how he got his dark power boosted like that, but he's gonna be a handful and a half I don't have time to mess with! Freak! I don't even know if I can tackle him all pumped up like this now!'

"You don't have to do that, Creeper! This is between you and me, not anyone else!!"

"There is no 'anyone else' to us! Humans are the same as ants and cows to us! Now surrender!!"

'Shit! Even if I bolted past him how do I handle a plane whose engines get blown out by sucking in some stupid bird? Or two of them? Or more?? I know enough from building model planes in the Boy Scouts that it's not like the Superman films; you just can't grab a wing and help fly it down, especially during landings and take-offs, the worst most delicate times!'

Desperate, Blueberry lifted her cupped hands towards the distant flock then stopped; 'Wait! I could fry that whole flock before they reach the airport from here, sure! Creeper's gotta know that! What is it? He doesn't believe I have the heart to zap some birds?? Think! Think!!'

She anxiously watched the flock less than a mile from the airport and beyond, tiny far airliners orbiting in holding patterns –

'Wait! I can't zap all those birds from here without some energy spill-over affecting some of those planes beyond them! If I mess with their avionics or radars the wrong split seconds...'

"Surrender!!"

"Creeper this is sick! Call them off!!"

"Surrender!"

No choice! No choice!!

"Call them off first!! I wanna be sure you won't go back on your word and go on whacking planes just for jollies! Even Kare never sank that low!!" Blueberry snapped with desperate goading, noting as Creeper bridled.

"We are our own master! We are nothing like Him!" Creeper boomed.

"Then show it!"

Creeper glowered. The flock steered away from the airport.

"Nice trick, Creeper," Blueberry sourly quipped. "Then you were always fond of animal stooges, weren't you?"

"Enough impudence! Lower your aura!"

'Man! I gotta stall till I whip up something!! All them battle scenarios with dad and there're no tricks for this! Where's all that Powerpuff combat intuition he keeps swearing I have, uh?? Shit! If Creeper was inside some old lecher like last time I could at least zap him unconscious or something – Wait!'

"Look, it's not that easy, Creeper! I can drop my shields if I wish it, but if my subconscious Puff instincts doesn't agree it'll stay up."

"Stalling!!"

"Look, even Mojo knew the same thing with the Jap chicks, that's why he couldn't smash them even after knocking them unconscious when your boss turned Bub's octi-dollie bad! Com'on, scan me out and see!!"

'Man, hope Dad's research is right that he can't!'

Creeper seemed oddly demure and shrugged. "No matter. I take it you're also mortal like they are are you not?"

Oh-Oh. Oh heck, might as well. "What about it?"

"Turn into a mortal now and we'll spare your life."

"Or squash me like a bug?"

The flock turned for the airport.

"Aw com'on, Creeper!!"

"Then transform back a mortal now and live! They up there will live too!"

Man! He's got me boxed-in better than a cave-in!

Blueberry soberly nodded. "Look, I'm not gonna transform into – my ordinary self a thousand feet over open ocean. Let's do it on the beach."

"Very well!"

'Shit, this is it!' Blueberry gloomily thought, floating toward the beach, her mind furiously rummaging options and counterplays; 'I can't give in! I'll be good as Alpo! But if I try to surprise him in that pumped up state...no, I can't risk him taking it out on a plane! There's gotta be a way out! Gotta!!'

They approached the shore where an army of ambulances and firemen were still attending the hundreds of sprawled bodies on the beach. She could even see paramedics shaking their heads over stretchers of fully clothed victims;

'Yea, me too, guys,' Blueberry thought for welcome distraction on the way to the gallows. 'Makes no friggin' sense coming to the beach to soak some rays in your street clothes and ending up with a I.V. up your arm!...'

'Wait...soaking rays...street clothes...why's that ringing me –??'

Creeper interrupted; "We're close enough."

With a grimly braced chest, Blueberry shook her head. "No, not near them."

"What difference does it make?"

"I don't need an audience watching you do like a sledgehammer on a ladybug after I transform, right?" Blueberry bitterly said and Creeper chortled.

"Now why would we kill a beauty like you once you're rendered harmless?"

"Because if you know anything about Powerpuff gear, my mind harnesses white energy through my compact, and it's keyed to my brain waves tighter than the combination to Fort Knox. My belt's useless to anyone else."

"Yes, that would be a loss, but at least one bothersome white energy entity will be nullified."

"So you're saying you bear no grudges, huh?" Blueberry asked and Creeper cackled.

"You are a wit as well as beauty without compare, Puff or mortal, and we won't squander that when we possess you as our new hive. Within you, we shall become the Queen of Darkness, with your natural beauty as our title. Men will bow before us even without using our powers on them!"

"Natural beauty, uh? I think you're gonna be disappointed."

"Enough!" Creeper barked as they landed a stretch of beach. "Transform!"

"Wait! How do I know you really dismissed your troops – like we bargained?"

"Troops??" Creeper said with a quizzical frown then catching her inferences, looked up toward the distant flock of spiraling geese between them and the airport. "Ready to do my bidding as soon as you balk!"

'Man, this isn't just my last stand! It's my last minute on Earth! Shit, I'm gonna die here!! I can't end up part of Creeper! I can't! Only wish Dad and Yo were here to know what happened, or just any witnesses, even those fools laid out on the beach!'

'Fools in street clothes out to soak some rays...

'Why's that nagging me of all times??'

"Creeper, can I ask a question?"

"You're stalling!"

Of course I am, A-hole!!

"Look, you're not gonna begrudge a gu – er, gal her last words, are you?"

"Chatty as a woman as always!"

"Hey, I take offense to that!"

"Get on with it!"

"Yea, well, I was just wondering, but are you that afraid of me?"

"Afraid??"

"I mean isn't using birds to crash some planes just to get at me kinda lame?"

"Whatever works!"

"It's just that I'm a little disappointed, Creeper. I mean, there can't be much satisfaction crushing me when I'm mortal, you know? I thought you swore to tear me apart and love every rip, and now you won't even have to lift a finger getting rid of me."

"We're simply tired of playing games with an imp!" Creeper impatiently growled, yet in that ominous utterance Blueberry felt a puzzled tweak of hope;

'Why doesn't he want to fight me?? Especially since he's show how all pumped up he is now??'

'Why??...'

Street clothes...people off the street...coming to a beach to soak some rays...some sun...

Solar energy...

'We're tired of playing games with an imp!'

'Tried..'

Shit, I don't know what all these nagging clues mean but I gotta gamble a wild guess or not see tomorrow! Gotta chance it!

"Or...maybe it really means you're a – coward, Creeper!"

"What??"

'Grab a wild idea, girl – guy!! Take the chance!!'

"Yea, a coward, because I wanna go down swinging, but you gotta hide behind a hundred skirts on a couple of airplanes to beat me! What a lousy cowardly cheat! Say all you want about Kare but at least he went toe to toe with three Puffs before he bit the dust, and here you are – cheating like a weasel just to get one lousy little girl! And you want my soul to be a spore piece of you too? No way, Jose! I'd rather gift-wrap my soul to Kare than a worm like you!"

Creeper glowered and darkly glowed. "We were willing to spare your insignificant mortal life and you dare insult us!"

"Then take me on right now, Creeper! I got nothing to lose! Let's roll!"

"Enough games!!" Creeper roared, waving to the flock which turned for the airport.

Shit! It'll take 'em maybe a minute to get there! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!!

"Hey, no stand-ins, Creeper! Com'on! You like my bod so much? Taste it – if you've got the nuts!"

"Your insolence will pay!"

"I don't think so, Creeper! Somehow, I got the feeling I'm not the only one who's stalling!!" Blueberry snapped, springing off the beach and again raced toward the airport and as before Creeper leapt before her, but instead of stopping, she plowed on and Creeper dodged like a shifting school of fish. Blueberry's momentary relief was derailed seeing that not only wasn't Creeper not pursuing or attacking her, but was rushing down along the shore.

'Yes!!'

Like lightning she flitted back and blocked him.

"Nimble move, Creeper! Now, just were you trying to run off to, uh?? Why didn't you just slap me one instead of hanging me up from reaching your troops since you're so juiced up now you can toss a thousand ton wreck, uh? Suddenly I gotta funny feeling that those birds are just an off your head back-up plan! Pardon a mo' while I check something out, okay?"

"What are you doing??" Creeper roared as Blueberry abruptly soared high and closed her violet eyes for the lathe of her mind to fashion the form she wanted white energy to take and extended her cupped hands which shot forth a giant shell of white energy headed for the still smoldering darkly glowing freighter smashed up on the rocks.

"Noo!!" roared Creeper as the energy ball surrounded the glowing hulk.

"Wow! I can even feel that black feedback pushing back in my head! You sure used a lotta juice to turn that thing into a dark missile, didn't you? Let's see how much, okay??" Blueberry said, extending a single fist which flew open and expelled a white beam smacking Creeper right in the center. momentarily jolting his constituent spores to slightly disperse.

"AGGHHH!!"

"Yea! Looks like a liar didn't munch his Wheaties this morning, right??" Blueberry anxiously looked toward the airport and saw the flock momentarily scatter in brief confusion and a sly smile curved her coral lips.

"Yes!!"

"You bitch – AGHHHH!!" Creeper bellowed under her next shot and the flock went even more askew. She targeted her cupped hands at Creeper;

"Command them to break off, you big fat faker! I can totally destroy you right now! Do it!"

"Maybe we should leave a few hundred lost lives on your conscious instead!"

"I'm banking that you value your hide more than making me lose sleep! Do it!!"

Creeper muttered before sun-hot violet eyes and he shrugged and the birds broke off into a wide circle orbiting the airport.

"Let us leave!"

"Not quite yet! I canned your gas station but not your hotels!"

"What??" Creeper roared as Blueberry spun and concentrated her mind and shot forth from her hands scores of glowing spheres that flew toward the beach of unconscious victims, each sphere swiftly expanding into a bubble engulfing every unconscious person there.

Creeper roared. "No!!"

"Yea! Can't run and hide now, like that trick at that junkyard when you split-up into hundreds of dark monsters – only these folks ain't anymore now because you sapped all their dark juice like a big spare battery to pump yours up to throw that freighter at me after luring me out here with some sneaky dark scents, right? I bet you scavenged half of Argentina to get enough monsters for the job, and all for crap because you just gave away one of your secrets too; that you can cloak dark missiles with my name on them. But now that I felt the stealth frequency of that freighter's black aura, your next surprise in-coming might as well sound like a homecoming parade!"

Creeper muttered, "If you hadn't moved that one split second –!"

She steeled down her spine's shiver of that; "Yea, ruined your day, huh? So when you struck out you fell back on a lame play that took me for a sucker because I was so shaken up by my near miss that I didn't even try to press an attack to see how strong you really were! I assumed you were just messing with my head with this lame bird attack act!"

"We caught you with your panties down, that's satisfaction enough! Next time we'll not be so charitable!"

"What makes you think there'll be a next time?" Blueberry uttered, leveling cupped hands at him. "I'm gonna blast you back into a billion mutant spores, and this time I'll coat everyone of your freakin' spores with white energy so they can't get together again like Humpty Dumpty! Yea! Food for the fishes!"

Creeper waved at the flock. "They're programmed to continue their mission if they lose contact with our life-force!"

"That's alright. I think I'm quick enough to take 'em all down like ducks in a gallery without your hassle and remote-control! I'm not all that an animal rights nut!"

"Are you swift enough to stop all our minions in the city too? Without our life-force controlling their spores, they – and their hosts – will go on a mindless out-of-control rampage all over in places you can't stop!"

Blueberry paused, nonplused and vexed. "Such bullshit!"

"Try us, little violet damselfly!"

Blueberry gnashed her perfect gleaming teeth, reflecting on her father's research; '...My conclusion, my son, is that Kare's dark spores are indiscriminate of who they infect into dark monster hosts, but not every dark monster's parasite spore is active, so most hosts are benign unwary souls living innocuous everyday lives, although some are predisposed to mischief and criminal inclinations and make the really dangerous tag-teams you have to worry about. I'm certain Creeper emits a kind of carrier wave that keeps each spore on stand-by activation because a spore acting on itself is kind of like a human body suddenly plugged into the brain of an ant. Indeed, I have a suspicion that this is a gauge of Creeper's current limits; that there are far more dark monsters out there than he can simultaneously control, or else we would've besieged by a dark army months ago,'

'Trust your feelings, Blueberry, my son...'

Ablaze with white aura, Blueberry reluctantly lowered her hands; "You can't do any harm crawling back in a sewer," she growled. "But poke your ugly mug up just once and I'll knock it so hard you're think it's Big Ben ringing thirteen!"

Creeper cackled and waved skyward and birds dispersed to resume their confused un-hijacked lives. "You're a wise young lady."

"No 'lady' – and not soft either!" Blueberry snapped even as some voiceless suggestion of tact held her back from blurting 'loser' and 'beaten'. "You're just a freak spore jellyfish hiding behind the skirts of a lot of innocent people! Something not even Kare did! A big blob Coward!!"

Creeper roared and blackened with rage; "We're no coward!!"

"Then next showdown take your grudge to me yourself, not behind any lame pawns, got it??"

Creeper glowered, "Dark monsters are part of us! Not 'pawns'!"

Blueberry snarled at a technical half-truth, but Creeper's assertion saved face before a victor who only wished to seal shut a cracked door to nasty guerrilla tactics.

'Man, he must really hate Kare to not even want to think he's worst than him in a bad way and that's how I've gotta play it! But then in a way, spores were Kare's slave too...'

Grudgingly Blueberry nodded like it was a tacit draw. "Alright - but leave anymore outsiders out of it – humans or animals, and throw in plants too, knowing you! IF your word's more golden than Kare's!"

"Kare!" Creeper snickered with a roar which oddly dropped to a bitter muttering voice; "He would've prevented our likes from ever combining and evolving because he'd know we're a vastly superior being and far more competent! The only reason we're delayed in taking over this continent is because somehow you're far more powerful than your sisters put together! Puny Japan would've been in our pocket a year ago were we in control over there instead of our former fool of a master! But this we vow, Blueberry, we shall not rest until we crush you, as Puff or mortal, into a pink pulp which we'll drink with relish! No means will be spared!!"

"Boasting cools you off quicker, bastard! And I'll make a promise too, vacuum bag; One day I'll sweep up and de-tox all these poor dark monsters from your spell and on that day, face to face, you're cold meat!"

'Huh? Wait a mo'! Why'd that ring a bell??'

Cold meat??..

Cold – !!

'Holy Shit –!!'

With a gasp of tardy realization and swinging her hands up for an instant blast, Blueberry whirled at Creeper milliseconds too late as he burst into an expanding swarm of spores that rapidly sub-divided as it dashed into every corner of the skies. In exasperation Blueberry lowered her fist and slammed it into her palm.

"Damn!! I can't believe it!! Could've sacked him cold forever! Frozen his ass and just left his life-force humming on like static on a radio! Without any orders all the spores in a dark monster are as dangerous as dandruff! Damn! Well, at least all those poor suckers are free of him, but how's he gonna try to zing me next??"

ooOoo

"Er, excuse me, Mr. Grimes –" the executive aide-de-camp nervously issued at the end of a huge polished mahogany table before a huge panoramic view of Buenos Aries which was occupying the attention of a husky immaculately attired figure. "But, are you sure you want to push a hostile acquisition like this without the board's review?"

"You question me, Shepherd??" gruffly admonished the skyline gazer. Grimes reminded Shepherd of a bearded middle-aged Hercules stuffed in a budging dapper pin-stripe suit, and his voice and demeanor was just as hard.

"I – I – no, sir! I – I was wondering what to say to the Tico Textiles people if they inquire."

"Simply inform them that if they don't permit me to acquire their assets without protest, then I'll purchase every mill supplying them. Then they'll start worrying about their mortgages."

"Er, they can always import instead, sir."

"Sure. And see how far those tariff margins will sustain them! Go!"

Shepherd swiftly left behind the polished double mahogany doors and Grimes snickered at the man's wake and returned to the harbor view. It was one from one of the few truly towering spries in the huge sprawling city.

From the small window vent in streamed a huge black swarm of bees – or looked like bees.

Frowning, Grimes muttered under his breath as the swarm entered the room then gathered into a dense cloud taking the form of a sumo wrestler.

Grimes smirked. "Huh. I thought I sensed you lurking out there a few minutes ago," he said as though needdlng one's courage. "Nice to finally meet you, too."

"We have a mission for you."

Grimes shrugged. "I'm busy."

"This is not a request!" Creeper rumbled but Grimes calmly snickered.

"Look, I used to be our old boss's hack in Toyko too before he was sent packing, so I'm no one's hoop-jumping stooge anymore. And don't try to intimidate me; my dark energy's spun from the pure stuff, not merely an infection of lame black spores, so I'll never be your marionette like the others, and neither are you going to lay the hammer because you obviously need my – potential services far too much."

"Don't be insolent, Grimes. That dark energy immunity means squat if we bait a Powerpuff here to nullify it! Where would your cut-throat success in business be without dark energy amplifying your aggressiveness and greed then, umm??"

Grimes's solid stature shivered at that thought despite trying to conceal it. Creeper cackled; "Yes! You'd shrink back into the street shoe-shining effete shrimp you were before becoming "contaminated" by a pure black light host! You'd lose your spine and competence and your board of directors will oust you for ineptness! And worst, your renown legions of supplicating females will desert you faster than a hot potato!"

Grimes hated being checkmated. He idly went around his table to whip a Havana cigar from the humidor and reclined on his plush leather lounger.

"Just for the record, unlike all of Sedusa's other spore-infecting one-night stands, the ditzy broad was so dazzled by my "enhancement" that she not only strung with me long enough to imbrue me deep with her dark light, but I even managed to knock her up a couple of times back too – but fortunately the 'results' evaporated every time she transformed back into that pastry pansy!" Grimes cackled then smirked over a drag of cigar. "That clingy schizo's one reason I moved my H.Q. over here – which turned out a good thing since I missed the black-light vacuuming Kare performed all over Japan for his idiotic grand stand with those nuclear nymphs!..."

With a long cigar drag, Grimes swiveled his lounger's back to Creeper to gaze out the city. "Now, for a mutant conglomeration of spores with powers almost rivaling anything Kare wielded, I gather you've been having a way harder time putting one little girl in her place –"

"This is an extremely exceptional Powerpuff female!" a slighted Creeper interjected. "Not only is her white aura emission pure, she's even a mystery to own sisters-in-arms in Japan."

Grimes snickered and took a savoring drag of stogy. "Huh! Like they even have an inkling of the true reason they're superbeings by fluke, like monkeys given a gift of pearls! This whole planet's a pawn turned King in the game because of that asinine Kare!" Grimes smiled as Creeper momentarily glanced about. "It should've been a pushover for him to've intercepted that Albusi courier packet as it cruised by this solar system centuries ago, but instead, while that clawed clown was basking on some beach, it literally drops into the paws of humans who manage to find out just enough to rub the magic lamp and pop up three white angels who managed to trash and can his clumsy ass! Gads, that bozo never would've made it in the door of my personnel office!"

Again Creeper seemed to glance about and Grimes cackled; "Still feel the paranoia of speaking ill of our ex-Master, uh?"

"It's not just Him we're concerned about," Creeper rumbled with a dropped voice. "If the Overlords ever sensed that we're now autonomous –"

"Screw them! If they were so wise and perfect Earth would've been slammed into a corner pocket of the collective centuries ago instead of being contaminated by some white energy cowbirds who have no business even existing! Now, were it us who had his powers instead of an inept clown it would've been a different story today all over, eh?"

"You're threading dangerous ground –"

"Oh come now, don't say that never crossed your minds! You're not slaves anymore, are you? We might not be privy to the whole galactic enchilada, but you know the general scheme of things. I mean, I trust you also have some residual vibes of Kare's thoughts in your psychic fabric too."

Creeper demurred; "What traces of Him are left in us is inconsequential to the task at hand. That being Blueberry!"

Grimes smacked his lips. "Blueberry. Ah, yes, that luscious nymph of the Southern Cross, to quote the media. Quite a stunner, isn't she, even when all that video footage can never focus well on that her face and body. Then maybe that's a good thing; I heard that males who've encountered her face-to-face literally can't get her off their minds, and even afterward the memory lingers like cigarette smoke."

"Yes. Her light distortion ability is almost as impressive as her effect upon the minds of men."

"And without spores and dark rays. Jealous?"

"Such paltry emotions are beneath us!" Creeper asserted. "We need to uncover her secret if we're to dispatch her with minimum hassle and time. She eludes even dormant spores scattered this region. We need spies without any dark light taint which she can sense. Ordinary human spies you can hire and assign to track Blueberry down."

"Oh? For what price?"

"Price??"

"Don't growl. Everyone has a price when the item's right. What – share dominion over this continent until the other Puffs wise up?"

Creeper mumbled. "We can – discuss this at a later time."

"I'd rather place cards on the table face-up from the get-go – 'partner'," Grimes uttered. "I don't intend to mosey up with another loser."

Creeper bridled like a roar. "Loser??"

"Blueberry's still fluttering about free as a silver hummingbird, isn't she? Despite all the energy bolts you've thrown at her – which was considerable in your last tango in that junkyard. Almost as much Kare did when finally wisened up and nearly put those three brats away up on that skyscraper before Blossom bushwhacked the cocky fool with that boomerang hair bow."

Creeper turned aside. "Would you be as obstinate if Blueberry paid you a call via an anonymous tip?"

"Ha! I'd love her to have it!" Grimes cackled with rolling eyes and smacking lips. "That angel nymph would be the zenith of all my erotic fantasies! Yes, I can die happy having her!"

"Huh! You have a much a chance of that as we defeating her obscene powers in the short run!"

"Sure. That's why you come creeping in here requesting me to spy out her mortal form to squash like an insect under a boot! Not very sporting, is it?"

"Our ex-master held such specious "sportsman" attitudes toward the Puffs and paid dearly for it."

"Fluke wisdom aside, all he would've done was released the white entity matrix knitted to their mortal life-force, whose sympathetic essence and vibes would've immediately merged with the others' own and he'd have two even more powerful puffs to contend with."

"Not if they all can taken down simultaneously."

"Possible...if you can swing it within a split second without that damn digital hound back in Tokyo sounding the alarm. Still, the best way to obliterate white energy is by direct black energy neutralization, not cracking the shell of its mortal host for it to only flit off to another nest. Personally, unless it's too personal a grudge, I'd forget this mortal assassination scheme."

"Too challenging, Grimes?"

"No, just being pragmatic. In a sense, those girls and that pooch are doing us a favor by locking up those white energy matrixes in their beings, kind of like how a plutonium warhead is divided up into sub-critical pieces to prevent a premature detention. If you destroy their mortal forms either separately or simultaneously their white matrixes will escape, still possessing the patterns of their souls which will merge as one mass such that it'd be like facing a – well, you saw what happened to our inept ex-master when the Puffs were separated from their white force."

"Ummm. You have a point. So the issue is defeating the Powerpuffs directly, black force against white force, like how matter against anti-matter takes no prisoners. Still, Blueberry wields considerable power. Far more than she ought possess."

"True..." Grimes said, standing and slowly moving before a small statute fountain. "But like you and me, and even Kare, not all she could muster. Or knows she can."

"What are you suggesting?"

"Why, the grand scheme! A peek into to the Overlord's secret game!"

"Stop talking in riddles!"

"Apparently you lack a sense of drama. It's pretty elementary; to various extents quantum-beings like Overlords and Albusi all tap the same spring of universal null-space energy, though actually 'tap' is a misnomer; skimming cream is more like it because we're limited by the very forces that compose us to sip the raw juice, and we accept those limits as naturally as humans accept and allow for the limitations of their corporeal forms to gravity. Those limits have long been the level playing field between Overlord and Albusi. Now, I'd been wondering a long time just why until the end it seemed Kare was just toying with the Puffs. True, he was a clown, but he was a sly bastard too, and the Puffs were regularly whipping his fanny too many times just for pride to let walk after every tango, especially since technically Kare possessed near the threshold of energy tolerance any quantum-being could weild. So I'm saying to myself, is humiliation by a couple of Earth maggots worth pulling your best punches...or could it be Kare sensed that they were far far more formidable than he?"

"What??"

"Remember, Kare was dispatched to intercept that Albusi packet to their Xon Guardians because it was supposedly crammed with their latest armory developments to cook our side's gooses with, only something must've happened to it on its cruise to send it careening to Earth. Only this clown was too busy paying Godzilla terrorizing the Edo mortals to notice it and that some sharp humans lucked on it too."

"What are you suggesting?"

Grime took a puff. "I can't prove it, naturally, but I think that packet contained a matrix allowing direct null-space field tapping magnitudes beyond anything our side has. The fact that the Puffs and that pooch bounced back even after exhausting their white energy booting Kare into the black wild yonder is a sure sign this is so."

Creeper was stunned. "Are you implying that Powerpuffs are actually far more powerful than we? If that were so why didn't they crush Kare from the start?"

"I wondered that too, unless it's that they're actually unaware of their total potential!"

"Unaware?"

"Remember, though they briefly transform from mere flesh and blood into quasi-quantum beings as Powerpuffs, they still possess human minds, and their fumbling upon that Albusi packet which was meant for their Xon Guardians is like a troop of Girl Scouts shipwrecked a desert island of hostile natives stumbling across a factory-fresh crate of S.E.A.L. gear! Of course, an entity matrix is even better since it merges with life forms on contact and automatically enhances their host's features and capabilities, though not necessarily their total control of those new powers."

"Ah. We see! Human minds are limited in universal comprehension and perception. It wouldn't perceive its own full quantum potential!"

"Exactly. It's like an Olympic athlete who gets amnesia and only performs tasks ordinary folks do because that's all she assumes she's capable of. If the Puffs ever got wind of their true full capabilities, we can pack it up! I have a feeling that's why Kare was so damn overcautious pulling his punches since the Chakichaki chicks trashed his can. He was afraid he'd provoke the Powerpuffs into realizing their own full potential."

"But if this entity enhancement matrix is such an advance, then why does the battle continue in the universe? Why haven't the Albusi prevailed?"

"Hey, I don't know all the answers; I'm stuck down here on this rock! But my best guess is this new matrix has some inherent flaw that the Albusi later discovered and haven't figured out yet and so haven't disseminated among their Xon Guardinas. Maybe the same flaw that brought it down to earth. Who knows?"

Creeper nodded. "What you state has merit. We often sense that Blueberry doesn't actually tire in battle, but rather strives to end a battle quickly, as though her endurance is dependent upon some other factor."

"Oh? You mean like a energy access countdown limit?"

"Perhaps, though we can't imagine why."

"Then that makes her matrix more unique than I thought since her Jap sisters have no such time limits but are markedly weaker. Let's hope they don't start trading secrets."

"Do you think that's possible? That humans can modify their own matrix so?"

"I severely doubt it too. The white entity matrix is fused with the Puffs' very substance and life-force, and for primitive minds as theirs to go messing around with it on their own is tantamount to a self-performed lobotomy with stone knives and bear skins. No, we must employ different techniques to pull their fine ivory teeth."

"What kind of techniques?" Creeper asked and Grimes slyly chuckled and blew blue smoke rings and tapped remote buttons on his armrests and a dozen wall panels slid open around the room and fired-up wide-screen views of news videos and pictures showing Blueberry in action against Creeper in junkyards and shattered slums and nearby forests. Some screens repeated various battle moves Blueberry performed and some showed composite photo 3-D views of Blueberry rotating in space and even extrapolating her naked form.

"I saved the best for last because I thought I'd be painful," quipped Grimes and Creeper growled.

"You've been busy, Grimes."

"Naturally. A curvy package of highly condensed white energy cavorting over my city and thrashing spores and their human hosts naturally concerns me."

"That's not our meaning! You've been more than merely observing her! You've been studying her all along!"

"Well, when you're right you're right," Grimes shrugged with feigned modesty then an almost lewd grin. "And you're right about my designs on this lovely luscious looker. I want her defeated, yes, but I also want her intact. Unscratched. Because, just as every pageant director and modeling agency around the world as well as Hugh Hefner has voiced since her pics came out, that Blueberry is the ultimate looker. An epitome of pulchritude and femininity. And one day I mean to possess her every curvy contour and sassy soul."

"Ha! You can't even find her and you're talking about capturing her heart!"

"In time, in time. The clue to possessing Blueberry is in her origins and that of her kind. I have reason to believe that Blueberry even pre-dates the Japanese minxes for quite a while, but for some reason made no appearance until Kare made his exit."

"How are you so sure?"

"The dormant spores sprinkled all over this region show traces of a temporary jump activation made over three hundred years ago, as though by a Zeon flash."

"Zeon flash? That's what Kare first sensed before the Chakichaki girls appeared."

"Yup, The sub-space radiation pulse created by a white entity matrix while transmuting an Albusi into a Xon Guardian...or a earth mortal into a quasi-quantum being like them. And a subsequent minor one two years ago."

"Two years. When the iceberg exploded and the Powerpuffs first appeared."

"And there was one made a year previous to that, which I suspect was Blueberry's 'birth'."

"So you believe these Zeon traces marked the creation of these pests?"

"Well, there's no doubt that the pure black energy that Utonium and his brat blew from that oversized ice cube in the harbor and which infected several of Kare's best minions originally came from his matrix, and so logically the same white energy binding it there was blown up and scattered too – to infect three morals and that mech mutt."

"That would be logical – IF it explained Blueberry's creation a year prior."

"Yes, that's been a mystery to me, and the only thing I can assume is her mortal self somehow somewhere stumbled upon the remains of the same white entity matrix source which created the ChakiChaki chicks."

"Interesting points, but obscure."

"There must've been some kind of catalyst that activated the white entity matrix to create the Ooedo Chakichaki Musume when the packet was found back then. How and who did it is a mystery, but once we uncover how it was done by mere Edo mortals, we might be able to hack a method to interrupt or jam that matrix's transformation binding process."

"Interesting. Does earth have even near the technology to allow such deep analysis and investigation?"

"Not a chance, not three hundred years ago or today – but between us and our residual memories of our previous masters and techno-skills, I think we can advance them a couple hundred years in my research labs."

"Yes! Unable to transform, these mortal Puffs will be as threatening as maggots under our thumb!"

"We don't have to kill them nor wastefully neutralize their power. Just disable them from transforming. With the right technology, we might even be able to milk white energy from them like cows for our own purposes. With these puff pests powerless and living out their lives in a special 'retreat' I'll be building just for them in the wilderness, you'll have a clear field to do as you wish – partner."

"You expect us to simply stop fighting Blueberry??"

"Well, I warned what might happen if you're too slow and push her too hard and make her too desperate. She might be unaware of her full white potential, but a human's primal mind has an extraordinary way of grappling new straws of survival and endurance. But then, if Blueberry indeed has a power-on time limit, you can instead try to push her past that threshold until she untransforms – but no more punishment beyond that! As I said, I want her intact."

"We make no such promise! If we find a kink in her armor we will bust it wide open! We needn't honor your meaningless hedonic indulgences!"

"Alright, we're in a race then, with unrestrained open season on our sumptuous Puff. And who ever comes out top, we're still partners in tackling her sisters then this pathetic world – and beyond, right?"

Creeper passed up Grimes outreached hand. "What makes you believe we would honor such a 'partnership'?"

Grimes coyly hedged a secret and sniffed his cigar; "Well...I know women, and if the Jap Puffs get a whiff that you took their Latin sister down, you'll wish you were up against our old boss instead of all alone facing a bevy of nuclear wildcats!" Grimes quipped and Creeper bridled then faced the window.

"What makes you so sure that you'd fare better than we, without even a fraction our powers?"

"For one thing, you've been throwing your best shots at a superbly skilled and wily warrior prepackaged with a thousand years of Xon Guardian racial memories and battle tactics... instead of attacking her tender flank as a vain mortal woman of human desires and frailties."

"What does that mean?"

Grimes shrugged. "You were never really human so don't try to comprehend."

"Huh! Then until you uncover the secret of Blueberry's power, our stance is unchanged. However, your ruthless business acumen is unexaggerated."

"Thanks for the backhanded compliment. I only regret you've no appreciation for cheeky redheads, ditzy blonds and sassy brunettes because I'd be happy to share – except for one snowy haired bitch. She's all mine!"

ooOoo

"Man, Barry, you must be pulling awesome grades for the teachers to cut you slack for cutting class!" chaffed Manual while walking home with his school's football buddies.

Barry demurely shrugged. "Naw, I wasn't really cutting. It was – just checking out an emergency at home."

Chuck cackled. "Emergency? Even the fire department doesn't get that many calls! What was it this time? A dinosaur skull drop on your dad's foot or something?""

Eddie flipped open his book knapsack. "Hey guys, check this hottie out!" he said, unfurling a Playboy centerfold.

Barry gasped aback.

It was obviously a close-up shot with a expensive zoom lens because it caught Blueberry sailing high over the cityscape on her back like she was on an invisible feather bed, one knee bent upward like in a bubble bath while her fluffy full ivory poodle ears like twin pillows nesting her back-leaning head, her feathery ivory eyelashes knit tight while her coral lips were lusciously agape as though in mid-moan, and though her features were slightly blurred, the expression of rapture on her face was unmistakable.

Barry felt a weird blushing rush of awe and appall;

'Shit!' he inwardly cried, 'They friggin' caught me gettin' – wind-stroked!'

"Man ain't she uber-cool??" Kevin joshed. "It's the first time Playboy did a spread that one kept her clothes on!"

"Yea!" Willy blurted. "Makes you hard jus' thinkin' what she's like 'neath!"

Barry sputtered. "Geesus Christ! I'm – she's hardly fifteen for Pete's sake!!"

Kevin rebuffed. "Hey, my dad says Katherine Hiegl was a hottie all over when she did 'My Dad The Hero' and she was only fourteen! Besides, how you know she's fifteen?"

"Huh? Er, 'cause, it was – in some interview I guess."

"Blueberry ain't done no interview!" Larry snapped. "Best they get is catching a few words from her after beating one of 'em creatures!"

Barry muttered. "Don't know why you all are all groovy 'bout someone you ain't ever gonna meet when I'd rather get up all close to a girlfriend I can touch!"

"Hey, I second that!!" Chuck blurted, smiling at Barry's scowl before he turned aside, almost blushing like a lobster. "Hey, what's up, bro'?"

"Nothing! Nothing!" Barry waved off the others as they turned a corner, "See you dudes later! I got alota homework catching to do!"

ooOoo

"Hey dad!!" Barry called, entering the museum's rear office, and idly drifting around he spotted on the desktop's screen a report;

"A Brief Conjecture of Powerpuff Costume Operations:

'My current investigation and speculation by direct observation and analysis of Powerpuff Blueberry sums that the Powerpuff crystal rings appear to be self-contained brain-wave actuated nanotechnic transmutation devices which effect primary PPGZ transformations and contain the subatomic blueprints for biological conversion and PPGZ uniform fabrication as well as the required matter-energy dis/re-assembly components. Though I'm unable to determine the power source which energizes these functions, I'm reasonably certain that this nano hyper-technology is actually able to glean energy from the structure of space itself. I do believe that upon materialization of the compact-resembling belt component, that the rings then channel the greater balance of gleaned energy into it like a battery to generate their aura's force-field and electromagnetic weaponry. This implies the rings have an energy gleaning duration limit and cannot continuously energize Powerpuff components...'

"Cool dad, cool!!" Barry chuckled, oblivious of a tuft of black soil peering over the rim of a bonsai pot on a nearby shelf.

'...The compact appears to directly energize the "donut" bracelets on a Powerpuff's wrists and ankles which perform as force-field generation modules which create their white aura's force-field which mega-amplifes their wearer's movement and strength and shields their entire skin surface from kinetic attack and I presume, even concentrate and effect rapidly alternating opposing polarities of planetary magnetic fields for flight. Since the power bracelets are dispersed four ways (ankles and wrists) just like cathodes and anodes, this makes sense for creating force-fields. And since they are doubtlessly fashioned by nanotechnology the bracelets can be soft as well as hard and still do the job. The compact also appears to generate force-fields that makes their costumes and fingerless gloves almost indestructible, even though their costume's fabric is still as delicate as regular cotton. It works much like the brilliantly glowing mantle burner in a camper's gas lantern or a kerosene stove. The mantle is made of a delicate cloth which is chemically treated to burn brightly without getting consumed itself. In the same way the peculiar mono-polar filaments which consist a Powerpuff costume conducts force fields generated by the compact which protects it from great damage. Hence ironically, without any force-fields activated, the material is as mortal as any other fabric and must be delicately washed and treated like normal clothes...'

"Ha! Haven't been in Blue's tights long enough to need to – Thank God!"

"...Conducting further research into how dark spores can animate inanimate objects and seemingly imbrue them personalities, I theorize that their nano-technology enables individual spores to manipulate local van der Waals forces into miniature force-fields that can move surfaces in contact, somewhat analogous to a sheet of paper sprayed with latex which warps under heat variables. With this effect ganged by a multiple of millions of spore covering an object's entire surface under a central orchestrating control, an inanimate object can be manipulated in a exo-frame-like marionette fashion, with the cognizer spores effecting an apt personality for it, as evidenced by Utonium's report on the animation of a skeleton's portrait during the Tokyo Powerpuffs' first encounter with Kare..."

"Man, just love basic research! Way to go, dad! I feel better knowing you're backing me up so hard! If there's anything else you want me to do, just call and I'll jump!"

The page flickered to a scene of him sitting before a before a bowl of strawberries next to cups of chocolate and whipped cream which he casually stabbed a fork into munch then follow-up assembly-belt style.

"Hey, I remember this! Man, talk about lame boring research! Sitting there and taking Dad's stupid questions! At least that lunch was good!"

Barry skipped to another page that popped up a similar but different scene that momentarily sucked his breath, seeing Blueberry, fluffy platinum poodle-ears escaping a blue ski mask, daintily dabbing strawberries into whipped cream.

Barry chuckled with broken humor; "Uh, well, that ski mask sure don't keep your eyes from buggin' out at 'that bod and legs! Er, my – er – her legs! Uh, forget it!' Barry sheepishly asserted, finding it difficult to both relate to and divorce himself from the leggy masked image.

"Yea, yea, I know she's me – too, yet seeing me – 'her' like this is like looking at a whole other chick. I mean, I almost wanna drool over the screen and yet I also feel a weird kind of giggly smug that I got me to do it, like I suck in a sucker or something! Man! Dad's right. It she's – my looks like that's able to turn me on like this, what kinda chance do normal guys like Chuck have? Shit! Why'd he pop up like that in my skull? Shit, it was because I was momentarily nuts being all gushy over him that I nearly got seriously whacked today! Stupid! Yet, it's funny, but I can't remember feeling crazy over him like that now! I mean, I remember everything I did and said, but there's no juice to it. Like how you remember being on the Six Flags Monster Coaster a year ago but not that blood-pounding thrill at the time, you know? Or maybe it's a good thing that I can't feel the way Blue does about things, uh? Mean it's bad 'nuff some of the way she behaves is seeping my brain, like feeling that swearing's uncool and making me a little skittish crashing guys in football...

"Shit! Having super-powers' the ultimate high – even fighting Creeper to the edge makes motorcycle racing feel like helping an old lady across the street, but I don't wanna turn into a super sissy either! But if dad's right, I might not be so lucky if I start to really like being a girl. Yea, real fag shit, but I remember being Blue last week and seeing that film crew making a commercial in the plaza with that model and that director guy yelled up at me that he'd pay me a hundred grand a week if I signed with him! A hundred grand a week!! Man, after a month I wouldn't even have to worry 'bout retirement! But why not? Just as a part-time job, you know? I can buy a red Ferrari and silver speed-yacht and all kinds of cool shit! Shit, maybe I should think that over! Yolanda screaming and melting in my top-leather bucket seat while my Ferrari screeching hairpin curves up the Andes! Yea!!"

Chuckling uneasily, Barry raptly watched as the shot zoomed on Blueberry's lips opening wide to ease a forked strawberry with a dollop of chocolate-tipped whipped cream between her luscious coral lips that seemed to savor each sumptuous nibble even before the pink tip of her tongue tagged it and her silvery eyelashes knitted shut in private ecstasy, and Barry felt an eerie self-conscious unease.

Oscar voice-over: "...As you see, Blueberry possesses a superior sensitivity and appreciation for the more sensual aspects of imbibing..."

"Hey, com'on, it was good but it wasn't THAT delicious!" he scoffed, then the scene expanded and zoomed in on Blueberry's well-rounded bosom then abruptly flicked into a reddish tint and presented firm upswept garnet-tipped peaches.

"Under infrared, the depth of olfactory and sapidatory stimulation can be more readily observed," recited Oscar Jennings, as the peaches's garnet tips slowly arched upward with every luscious spoonful of whipped-cream and chocolate dipped strawberry.

Barry gnashed his trembling lower lip from leaking drool.

"Hey! It – It wasn't all that good!!" he yelled, unwittingly catching himself crossing his arms over his chest. "Shit dad!! You're just jerking off on me!"

"Blueberry's erotic stimulation threshold extrapolates to a general sensory acuity approximately four to fives that of a human being, which suggests a further inducement to Barry's masculine ego to effect transformation beyond the excuse of adventure and moral duty."

"Hey dad! What'ya sayin'??"

"While I'd been concerned of various psychological perils to subvert Barry's psychosexual state, a physiological effect as these could seduce Barry's will to the female. I'm troubled by Blueberry's lingering psychological affect on Barry beyond transformation. His football aggressive scores chart a slow down curve, and even his colloquial gang speech has mellowed. Though there are no hard indications of disassociative personality complex, I've noted that Blueberry exhibits certain behaviors and sentiments normally alien to Barry as taste and color preferences and a subtle prissiness for order and manners. Another of my treatises speculates whether I'm being bigoted or alarmist, questing what actual harm would it be if Blueberry's effect indeed succeeded in converting Barry into a female, though I've a gut notion that the personality structure of my son would alter significantly in Blueberry's form. Possessing superpowers 24/7 and a freshly vain ego eagerly obliging a fawning public, and the new perspectives of super-senses and erotic stimulation, Barry's mind would find his former life and self wanting and lacking and little to relate to. It would be like asking a jet test pilot to return to the 'thrills' of a child's toy plane ride at a mall. In time, perhaps only within a year, a new different mind would morph from Barry's within Blueberry's skull, unabashed of her peerless beauty and heightened sexuality and feminine adoration. Currently I am doing all I can to forestall this possibility, and one issue involves somehow segregating him from his best friend –"

"What??"

The screen flicked to another session with a ski-masked Blueberry on the living room sofa, knees and violet Puff boots huddled like a proper modest young lady. Then the scene flicked to one of Barry in the same place from an earlier session, but in a lax posture with knees agape and sneakers sprawled before the screen flicked back to the previous one of Blueberry.

Oscar continued: "Note Blueberry's prim posture...entirely involuntary, indicating not just a female physiological shift but a feminine psychological one as well..."

The screen flicked back to Barry.

Oscar voice-over: "So Barry, how do you feel about Chuck?"

Barry snickered like something was obvious. "Com'on Dad, we're best buds! Heck, I'm practically brothers with the jerk!"

The screen flicked back to Blueberry on the sofa.

Oscar voice-over: "So Blueberry, how do you feel about Chuck?"

Blueberry erupted a coy titter; "Oh com'on, daddy, do I have to say it again? Me and Chucky are like, very best friends! I mean we're practically like – like brother and sister, you know??"

Blushing and nonplused, Barry read on; "Note Blueberry's coy alluding to any reference about Chuck. It's obvious she possesses an exaggerated favor towards in him that's inverse Barry's deep friendship and rivalry-regard with him. Another disturbing suspicion I have is that in Blueberry's extremely vain and haughty mode, Barry acquires a aloof perspective of his male self so disassociated and disdainful that he questions and reconsiders options and sentiments he has as a male, even to the extent of subverting those mind-sets by availing subliminal persuasive methods that persist after transformation. I believe this is evident in the shameful ploy that Barry concocted to use Blueberry as in a bait-and-switch-and-dump scheme to gain Yolanda as a prom date from Chuck. It must not be overlooked that Blueberry is transformed/created pre-programmed with shrewd and mature feminine wiles which augments her combat keen, as was successfully employed in the Battle of The Junkyard, and the force of these wiles can linger and manifest in Barry's persona as 'notions' which are tagged with sub-erotic impulses to further persuade him to alter his mindset to Blueberry's desire."

"'Blueberry's desire'?? Com'on! That's crazy!"

"In this case, Barry's desire to jilt Chuck of Yolanda as a prom date to secure Yolanda by briefly appearing before Chuck as Blueberry would appear excessively desperate measures for a staunch male gender identity as his, and his mortifying qualm of facing any of his male friends as a female. My belief is that scheme first germinated in Blueberry mode to seed Barry's impulse to present it to Chuck with Blueberry's sly express hope to effect a meeting between her and Chuck which will not turn out the bait-and-fly scheme Barry intends, especially since his persona is not entirely in force within Blueberry's female brain. Thus it would not surprise me that Blueberry's affection for Chuck has slyly booby-trapped Barry's guile to secure a lasting engagement with Chuck, and the most insidiously grievous part is, what Blueberry's bewitching charms, Chuck will hardly gripe about losing Yolanda as a date – who will in turn suffer the humiliation of being a stood-up at her prom..."

Befogged, Barry rose from the screen, shaking his head with chagrin and dismay.

"Naw dad...you're way off! Shit! You're acting like – like I'm schizoid or something! Like Blue's controlling me and not the other way around! Com'on! I ain't conning Chuck to dump Yolanda so that I – so that Blue can get...get HIM!"

A screen door slammed behind a forest of book shelves and Barry briskly jumped back to the chair before the TV just as Oscar emerged in the aisle. "Well, so happy to see you home in one piece, son!" the elder exclaimed, grinning pleased as punch giving his son a hug. "I heard how exciting your school lunch break was over the radio. How you feeling?"

"I'm alright – if you can call nearly being food for the fishes 'alright'."

"Make it sound like a lucky win."

"Luck? If I was at Vegas, Bill Gates would be our chauffeur right now! I'll write the usual blow-by-blow report tonight."

"Good. I hope our previous battle tactics analysis gave you the edge this time."

"I guess...I mean, a lot of my moves I don't even think about anymore so I guess I'm tapping these dormant Amazon battle tactics of Blue's, right"

"Evidently. As a matter of fact, my research has come up with a battle stance to more effectively focus your white energy discharge based on Blueberry's aura distribution, similar to how the very shape and surface contours of a lightning rod could enhance its negative polarity properties."

"Can hardly wait." Barry wryly sighed then jumping up to assume a ready gung-ho Marine position. "But after today, I don't care if a better power pose came from Swan Lake! Alright, lay it on me!"

"Well then, you stand erect – yes, like that, now left heel in front the right toe, arms at your sides, torso turned fifty-five degrees relative your foot axis, palms up parallel to ground with fingers spread, chin almost touching right shoulder and facial expression with a slight simper –"

Barry broke off posing. "Hey! You gotta be kiddin'!"

"Well, some of the deadliest karate poses initially look funny, like the crane and crouching tiger."

"Dad, I ain't practicing those moves till I'm back in Blue's skirt! Sheesh1 I thought you were helping me stay a guy, not any sissy!"

"Of course I want you to retain your masculinity, Barry! My God, if it weren't the fact that all of South America would be in the toilet if Creeper ran amok unchecked, I'd have you retire that violet belt forever!" Then Elmer asked almost curiously. "How do you feel about that?"

"What do you mean by that, dad? Like you didn't expect me to be jumping up and down over that? Or maybe you think I'm so hung up being Blue that I can't shake her, huh?"

"Er, well, super powers would be an addictive draw –"

"That's not what I meant, dad! Maybe I think a little more girly and act sissy shit when I'm Blue, but it's still the same me!"

"And I'm doing all I can to keep that status quo, son. To fortify your masculinity by all means."

"Well, so am I!!" Barry snapped, stamping out of the room before a bemused Elmer and marching home and stopping off at the YMCA to bare his peach-fuzzed chest and deliver a couple of blows at a punching bag till he was dripping sweat and even the boxing gloves ached.

"Man! I don't wanna lose it! Don't! But dad's right! I don't wanna lose either of them! My super-powers, myself, or even being...being Blue the chick. Being her feels so delicious and different, I'd hate to give that up. But I do think different when I'm Blue! Like about – Chuck! Can't believe my brain went all soft and soapy like that over him like that! It almost got me killed! Worst, I can't trust myself – can't trust my mind while Blue and facing him for this prom decoy thing! Crazy! Maybe I should just skip the whole idea!"

END CHAP


End file.
